Shahid Kapur going Dhan te nan in Kaminey

It’s on radio channels, iPod playlists, car stereos. Those sure of the hook line are even singing it. No one knows how to spell it or if the words mean anything at all. They are guessing those are perhaps the same words they used to shout when they wanted to express a sense of Bollywood thrill. Whatever be the case, they just can’t stop themselves from going Dhan te nan!

The Kaminey song, composed by Vishal Bhardwaj, written by Gulzar and sung by Sukhwinder Singh and Vishal Dadlani, has been a rage, from the discos to the autos. But the inspirations and the references in the song are as fascinating as the song itself.

Those who have heard Dick Dale’s Misirlou track used with the opening credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, would find the obvious similarity with the starting of Dhan te nan. But it was Black Eyed Peas’ Pump it, which used the same Misirlou loop and made it a lot more popular.

Back home, Vishal-Shekhar (yes, Pentagram man Dadlani’s music direction team) used a similar surf guitaring loop in the title track of Anubhav Sinha’s Cash. When we had asked Dadlani about the similarity to Misirlou, he had said: “Surf guitaring tends to sound the same but actually the two songs are different.”

And now, we have Kaminey’s Dhan te nan. We asked Dadlani whether it’s again a case of similar-sounding surf guitaring? “No idea... I’m just the singer,” he said. “Love how everyone knows about surf guitar as a style now, but when we did it in Cash, they said we ripped off the Black Eyed Peas song!”

The Dhan te nan grunt in the song again is very similar to R.D. Burman’s grunt in the Meri jaan maine kaha song in The Train. And later in the Charlie Theme song, Bhardwaj uses the James Bond theme in the middle. “As to why he’s used it, I think, it may be just because it’s fun,” says Dadlani. “But yes, Dhan te nan is a lot closer to Pump it and Misirlou than we were (in Cash). But it could be a deliberate reference. The one thing I gotta tell you, I haven’t enjoyed myself in a studio like that in a long time!”

Given Bhardwaj’s track record (Maachis, Maqbool, Omkara), we would wait for the film to release and try and read the references.

Pratim D. Gupta