‘Tere Liye’: How The Great Madan Mohan Was Resurrected By His Grieving Son

Eighteen-year-old Sanjeev Kohli was seated a row behind Yash Chopra when he overheard the words that would end up changing his life. It was the premiere of Gulzar’s Mausam (1975), a film that was dedicated to his late father Madan Mohan, five months after he passed away on July 14. 

As one of the songs played, Kohli heard Chopra tell his wife Pamela, “Bohot achcha music diya hain. - Madan ji ke saath agar kaam karta to maza aata (The music is fantastic. It would have been great to work with Madanji).”

Mohan died of cirrhosis of the liver, hurt by a business that had let him down. Kohli, even at 14, could see the great composer retreating into himself, often with a bottle of whiskey in hand. Sadly, Mohan’s death at 51 brought him more success than life had. “Mausam was my father’s first silver jubilee. Six months later, Laila Majnu (1976) became a golden jubilee hit,” said Kohli, from one of the conference rooms at Yash Raj Studios. ‘Koi Pathar Se Na Mare’ from Laila Majnu was #1 on the Binaca Geet Mala for 18 weeks. “He had never seen any of this in his lifetime.”

Back then, buying records was beyond most music lovers. The success of a song depended largely on the success of its film and the frequency with which it was played on All India Radio or Radio Ceylon. Kohli believed his father got left behind as most filmmakers stuck to their regular composers.  When Chopra said those words that night, he felt duty-bound to rewrite how history perceived his dad. “But what could an 18-year-old do, that too when his own father struggled to find work here?” he said.

Mohan’s music lived on, even if the industry began to forget him. “Nobody here cares about you after you’re dead,” he added. “You’re forgotten as your body is being burnt, even though funerals are well attended.” He felt this dejection in his bones, even as he struggled to cope with this loss. During the Emergency, his family was forced to sell the apartment where Mohan had recorded his music. During that sale, a cardboard box full of magnetic tapes ended up in his possession, along with a huge tape recorder. “Earlier, I was not allowed to even touch these. This was his gold.”

Whenever he missed his father, he inserted a spool into the giant Akai tape recorder and listened to one of his songs, most of which were master copies Mohan had recorded for himself. “Between the songs, I could hear him humming. It took me a while to realise these were tunes for songs he hadn’t yet made.”

The humming brought back memories he hadn’t unspooled in decades, memories of summer days spent with his father at his music room. “When he took us swimming as kids, he had this odd habit of singing very loudly from the deep end…like some Lothario. My friends would wonder what he was doing, but I remember him pulling us out of the pool and rushing to the music room to record some new tune. He was worried he would forget if he didn’t keep singing, and singing loudly.” 

That box of tapes contained more than 200 such tunes. “In some, I could hear myself as a child, sitting on his lap, crying, or playing. I must have been three or four…that’s how I guessed when that tune was made. Maybe 1958 or 1959?” said Kohli. On one tape, he found an alternate version of ‘Dil Dhoondta Hai’ from Mausam, with his voice accompanying the harmonium. Kohli listened to this obsessively, convinced it was better than the original.

These sessions worked like conversations between father and son. “I missed him so much. Those tapes were a way to listen to his voice again and again, for my emotions to be let out.” As the older son, however, he had to find a way to move on. Responsibilities kept mounting. He joined college and then went on to complete his MBA from IIM. But instead of a corporate job, he joined Polydor, a celebrated Eighties record label.

His career kept him in the music business, close to singers and musicians and even closer to his father’s unfulfilled dreams. A long stint as an executive with HMV helped Kohli reconnect with Yash Chopra; a relationship that would lead to him becoming the CEO of Yash Raj Films.

Even then, however, he did not bring up the cardboard box filled with his father’s tunes. When Chopra, who had mostly worked with either Khayyam or Shiv-Hari, searched for a fresh sound for his dance-based musical Dil Toh Pagal Hai (1997), Kohli vouched for Uttam Singh, one half of composer duo Uttam-Jagdish. According to Box Office India, the Dil To Pagal Hai album sold 1,25,00,000 copies, second only to Aashiqui (1990) in the 90s.

It took seven more years for that cardboard box to be reopened. Chopra and Kohli were driving to an event in South Mumbai when Chopra confessed that he had been feeling stuck. “Maza nahi aa raha hai. Ghanti nahi baj raha hai (There’s something missing. I’m not feeling that spark),” Kohli recalled him saying.

Chopra had been on the lookout for music for a film that was then called Yeh Kahaan Aa Gaye Hum, with a script written by Aditya Chopra and meant to star Shahrukh Khan and Preity Zinta. It was a film that was set in the past. Chopra could have worked with any composer of the time, but he was looking specifically for the timeless. In the coffee table book They Said It… released during the launch of Veer Zaara, Chopra writes, “I needed music with an old-world charm, tunes that traversed a 22-year time span, across two distinct ambiences of India and Pakistan, but most of all, a very soulful yet Indian feel.”

As though everything in his life had led Kohli to that moment, on that car ride, he broached the topic of his father’s unused tunes. “Yashji asked me not to come to work the next day. He wanted me to sift through the old recordings to see if we had enough for a movie.”

Thus began the daunting process of finding tunes that could be used for a film from 2004. So much time had passed that Kohli struggled to find a player for the spools. Once again, his career in the music business came to the rescue. He worked for a month and returned with 30 tunes that were still rough, unproduced, and decipherable only to his ears. To convert them into scratch tracks, as Chopra requested, he employed arranger VS Mani and a handful of other musicians. When he played them for Yash and Aditya Chopra, they chose the first eight, straight off the bat.

In this process, the older tapes kept breaking and needed to be stuck together. “Sometimes, he would have sung a mukhada, but the antara would be missing. For one song in Veer Zaara, the whole antara is mine, but I won't reveal which one,” he said. As the film was still being written, some scenes were scripted around a chosen song. The tune for ‘Do Pal’, for instance, was not in Mohan’s voice. It was played on the piano with parts missing. But when Aditya Chopra heard it, he knew it was moving enough to be used for the Shah Rukh-Preity separation scene.

The original ‘Aisa Des Hai Mera’ was not meant to be a patriotic song at all. “The dummy lyrics my dad had written were along the lines of ‘Waqt ka paiyan chalta jaye’ (the wheels of time, keeps turning).” What was most gratifying to Kohli was the alternate version of ‘Dil Dhoontha Hai’, which he had grown up obsessing over, making it to the final album. This tune became Veer Zaara’s most celebrated song, ‘Tere Liye’.

“There were many difficult moments when I wondered if I was doing it right,” he says. “At such moments, I could hear my father say, main yahaan hoon, main yahaan hoon (I am here, I am here).” Kohli completed 11 songs for the album, apart from themes for characters made using other unused tunes from his father’s collection. Javed Akhtar wrote the lyrics. Kohli collaborated with the best singers of the time, including the legendary Lata Mangeshkar, his father’s favorite.

“Despite all the support from Yashji and Adi, I was still very nervous before the audio release. I knew I had to satisfy three sets of fans; fans of the early 2000s sound, fans of Yashji’s music, and of course fans of my father’s who could easily have termed my work blasphemy.” The soundtrack released on September 2004, becoming the No. 1 selling album of the year. Tunes that had remained locked up in Kohli’s bedroom cupboard, some composed 50 years earlier, suddenly began to echo across the country.

“Today, his song ‘Lagja Gale’ has 300 million views on YouTube. The remix of his ‘Jhumka Gira Re’ has even more. He would have been so happy,” says Kohli.

And to think it all began that night in 1975 when a grieving son overheard an expression of regret.

“What better vindication for that 18-year-old boy, who saw his father sink into alcoholism. It’s a son saying things to his father that he never could when he was alive.