Remixes. Nowadays they come at you thick and fast. The formula is rather simple. One just has to pick up a fairly popular Hindi film song from the yesteryears, spice it up with a synthesised music track, add some unintelligible English Rap and alter the pitch a little. It doesn’t matter two hoots who is singing. What matters is a jazzy beat, which should be conducive to hip swinging on a dance floor. Promote it with a steamy video featuring scantily clad models and your remix is ready to serve. Composers- move on. Your days are numbered. It is the era of DJs and VJs!

    Bally Sagoo             Bombay Vikings

In late nineties, when DJ Bally Sagoo presented a remixed version of Chura liya hai tumne jo dilko with an unknown female voice to rock the UK dance floors, the genre had arrived. The Indo-Pak expat community- eager to hear something that was culturally more closer to their heart and yet was trendy and cool – lapped it up wholeheartedly. The MTV influence then made it into a global phenomenon and a teen-age craze. Popular names like ‘Bombay Vikings’ (Woh chali woh chali and Hawa mein Udti Jaaye) and Shazia Manzoor (Chandani raatein) are today what they are because of remixes.

It is very easy to pose in a pseudoartistic cloak as someone who is re-interpreting old classics in a modern way, exploring new artistic horizons but is it a fact? For me, the answer is a big - NO. Remixing is nothing but taking a piggyback ride to fame without really doing anything creative yourself. It might be entertainment but certainly it is no art. If creativity, originality, innovation and timelessness are the virtues that define quality of art, then remixes fail on all counts miserably.

Songs like Man dole mera tan dole, Kabhie kabhie mere dil mein, Baahon mein chale aao and Roo