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Jamming with my kids

Jamming with my kids

Sharing Intro of Gulabi Aankhen that I have played in High Speed Spanish Flamenco Rumba Style. I have been trying to learn this technique from last few years and this is my first attempt.

Playing Dhunki, a popular Indian Bollywood Sufi Rock-esque number, with my wife. I am a hobby guitarist and have an amateur family band in India with my wife and my kids. Check out our family band channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DeepakFamJamIndia/videos

Finally carved out some time over the weekend to sit down and play with my daughter. We decided to play the legendary "Hotel California", but with a twist that's very close to my heart.

This cover is a tribute to the late Vietnamese guitarist Thanh Điền. He was born blind, but what he could do with a single guitar was nothing short of miraculous - playing lead, rhythm, and percussion simultaneously in a style heavily rooted in Spanish Rumba Flamenco. He passed away recently, and his genius was a massive inspiration for this arrangement.
👉 Check out his incredible original cover here:    • ( Cover ) HOTEL CALIFORNIA by the EAGLES |...  

Beyond the music, "Hotel California" is a fascinating piece of songwriting - a dark metaphor for the alluring, glamorous addictions that trap you with "no way out."
👉 If you're interested in the story behind the lyrics, check out this deep dive:    • WE SHOW KAREN : Eagles - Hotel California ...  

A quick note for the guitar nerds out there: Don Felder recorded the original using a custom double-neck Gibson. He used the top 12-string neck (capo on the 7th fret) for that shimmering intro, and switched to the bottom 6-string neck for the epic solo duel with Joe Walsh. That exact guitar is actually sitting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art today!

My grandparents had a story they loved telling. Growing up in the 1950s, they weren't allowed to listen to Hindi film music - their parents said it "sounded too Western" and was "spoiling" Indian culture! Seventy years later, we treat that exact same music as the "Golden Oldies," the purest, most homegrown thing we own.

That contradiction is what got me digging. I play guitar, and my whole family is into music - my kids play multiple instruments, and we jam together most weekends. Once you put in the hours with chords and scales, you start hearing old Hindi songs differently. You stop hearing "our heritage" and start hearing where the pieces actually came from. A lot of this music was assembled - sometimes note for note - out of traditions that took other cultures centuries to build.

>Here's the idea I want you to carry through: this isn't only about copied tunes. It's about copied DNA - the kind that takes a whole culture generations to make.

A melody you can hum in an afternoon. A rhythm, a vocal technique, a whole mood - those are the slow inheritance of a place.

The Golden Era was already global. "Aaja Sanam Madhur Chandni Mein Hum" (Chori Chori, 1956) opens on the Tarantella Napoletana, an Italian folk dance dating to the 1400s. O.P. Nayyar's celebrated "tonga beat" is the same bouncy gallop that powers "Yankee Doodle." His "Babuji Dheere Chalna" (1954) is a straight lift of the Cuban standard "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás." Shankar-Jaikishan built one of Hindi cinema's most iconic dream-sequence songs, "Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi" (Awaara, 1951), on a melody by the Egyptian legend Umm Kulthum, "Ala Baladi al Mahbub" - sped up and smoothed out for Indian ears. And that "why does this sound Middle Eastern?" feeling isn't your imagination - it's the actual instruments. A lot of these songs carry a violin glissando, a kamancheh, an oud, a santoor. The Indian santoor itself descends from the Persian santur, carried into Kashmir centuries ago - when you hear it and think "that sounds Persian," you're right, just several hundred years upstream.

It's rarely just one layer deep, either. The "dreamy" orchestral-Arabian sound behind hits like Roshan's "Rahe Na Rahe Hum" traces to British composer Ron Goodwin's Music for an Arabian Night (1959) - which had itself dressed up Lebanese Rahbani Brothers melodies in Western orchestration.

>A copy of a copy: Lebanese to British to Bombay, credited nowhere along the way.

The uncredited musicians who built the sound. Here's the thing that changed how I hear these songs. Those "instruments nobody in India played" - accordion, Spanish guitar, orchestral violin - didn't play themselves. The Western sound of the Golden Era came overwhelmingly from Goan Catholic and Parsi arrangers, trained in church and dance-band music, who turned hummed tunes into full orchestral scores and then got a line of fine print, if that, while the composer took the fame and the Filmfare award.

>Goody Seervai, the accordionist behind "Aaja Sanam," was one of them. So was Sebastian D'Souza, who rebuilt the harmonic structure of the Hindi film song for Shankar-Jaikishan and O.P. Nayyar. The borrowing wasn't only from foreign melodies. It was from the uncredited musicians next door.

Raj Kapoor and a melody that had already crossed the world. That sweeping theme Raj Kapoor kept returning to - in Barsaat, Awaara, Sangam, Mera Naam Joker - is "Waves of the Danube," an 1880 Romanian waltz. By 1926 it had already become Korea's first popular song. By 1946 it was Al Jolson's "The Anniversary Song" - and this time the borrowing wasn't hidden: the American sheet music names it plainly as "music by Iosif Ivanovici." Kapoor almost certainly never saw that sheet music.

>That's the real story here - it’s not the borrowing, but not giving credit where its due.

Importing the swagger. Shammi Kapoor was our "Desi Elvis" - "Aaja Aaja Main Hoon Pyar Tera" was rock 'n' roll scrubbed of its rebellion and repackaged as safe, commercial dance. Kishore Kumar's yodel came from Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel," itself grafted from Alpine herding traditions refined over centuries. Here's the part that stays with me:

>Switzerland's national yodeling festival has run since 1924 and draws 12,000 performers; the tradition made UNESCO's heritage list in 2025. In India, the yodel survived exactly as long as Kishore Kumar did, then vanished. We borrowed one man's borrowed trick, not a living culture.

And it wasn't only his voice - "Ek Ladki Bheegi Bhaagi Si" is built on "Sixteen Tons," an American coal-miner's lament about dying in debt, turned into a flirty song about a girl in the rain.

R.D. Burman's "Sholay" title score is openly described as "spaghetti western" in sound - Ennio Morricone's mouth-organ-and-guitar language, transplanted to the ravines of Ramgarh. And "Mehbooba Mehbooba," the film's biggest song, is a near-direct lift of Demis Roussos's "Say You Love Me" - by most accounts requested by the director himself.

And then there's the one that still makes me laugh when I trace it all the way back. "Phir Wahi Raat Hai" (Ghar, 1978) - one of Kishore's most soulful, aching numbers - is built on the Carpenters' "Sing." Except the Carpenters didn't write "Sing" either - it was composed by Joe Raposo for Sesame Street, to teach American toddlers to hum along.

>A children's TV melody, turned into a soft-rock hit, turned into one of Hindi cinema's most heartfelt love songs.

The modern blueprint. The habit never died, it just got harder for Indian ears to spot, because the sources got more obscure. The 2000s ran on Amr Diab and Tarkan; "Kaho Naa Kaho" is built on "Tamally Ma'ak," "Shikdum" on Tarkan's "Şıkıdım," "Ya Ali" on "Ya Ghaly" by the group Guitara. Producers even swapped in the actual instruments of Arabic music - the oud, the qanun, the darbuka replacing the tabla - to make Hindi songs feel "exotic," as if the exotic part weren't just someone else's everyday. And playing guitar at home, I keep bumping into it myself. My daughter's music teacher heard me playing "Chahoon Main Ya Na" and said, "Sir, that's Led Zeppelin's 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You'" - he was right, same descending arpeggio. My daughter heard me playing Adele's "Set Fire to the Rain" and said, "Papa, I thought you were playing Kaun Tujhe" - capo the 5th, same chord skeleton. We stumbled on the Spanish singer Pablo Alborán and both thought: that's our Arijit Singh - not just his voice, but the entire production world, the close-miked piano, the fingerpicked guitar, the hushed verse into an aching chorus.

It's not the borrowing. It's the silence. Every musical tradition is a melting pot - the sitar likely came from Indian lutes meeting the Persian setar; flamenco is eight centuries of Moorish, Romani, and Sephardic influence layered together. Nobody builds a musical grammar from scratch. That's exactly why the lifting stings: when you take a chord progression a Global team spent months polishing, you're skipping the centuries of failure that made it work. What actually set the Golden Era apart wasn't the borrowing - it's what came after.

>Composers praised each other publicly and guarded their sources privately, and an audience with no access to global radio treated them as demigods. It worked because nobody in 1975 was going to catch the Demis Roussos record behind "Mehbooba Mehbooba" on All India Radio. Then YouTube happened, and the whole architecture became searchable overnight.

We never learned the language of music. India has a staggering culture of singing and dancing - look at how many people post dance covers online. What we don't have at the same scale is a culture of playing instruments and understanding how a song is built from the inside. As a guitarist, I've spent years just trying to find people to jam with here; abroad, weekend garage bands were everywhere. Last year my daughter's school tried introducing a rigorous Grade 9 Music Theory subject - real composition, not just performance, at an age when I'd bet a fair few of our celebrated "Golden Era" composers never encountered any of it. It got dropped for lack of interest. Once you see that, copying stops looking like villainy and starts looking like the obvious move -

>why spend a year wrestling an original melody with a less-than-10% shot at a hit, when you can adapt something already market-tested elsewhere?

And yet I can't give up hope, because I see the other half at home: kids at her school actually jamming, working out parts, building something instead of only performing it. That's how you eventually stop borrowing and start building, one school band at a time.

None of this is an attack on Bollywood's music, which I genuinely love. Its an attempt to reconsider the mythology around it.

>India isn't short on talent - it's been short on a culture that takes instrumental training as seriously as it takes melody and voice, and an industry willing to say "here's where this came from" instead of betting nobody would ever check. Now everybody can check, for free, in about ten seconds.

So the only real question left is the one we get to answer as listeners: do we keep calling the copying "nostalgia," or do we finally ask our music to do the harder, slower, actually-worth-it thing, and build something that's its own?

If you want the exhaustive version, I've put together a playlist of over 400 of the international originals themselves - years of pulling this thread, distilled into one place.

PS: This is an abridged version of a more rigorous research essay I wrote on Medium