The pickup artist
The melodic lead-in to ‘O Meri Jaan’ from the Metro soundtrack is a lite rock version of ‘Silent Lucidity’ by Queensrÿche. The bridge is a copy of a Pink Floyd song. The genius behind this musical theft is composer sampler Pritam Chakraborty:
… he has often been criticised for plagiarism. Pritam counters that he is simply “inspired” by various musical sources and cites his sources whenever appropriate. [Link]
Chakraborty is apparently the Babe Ruth of stealing tunes. This guy has a whole Wikipedia article dedicated to his lifts. There’s his Gangster megahit ‘Ya Ali,’ which Chakraborty claims is completely different from the Arabic song which inspired it — ‘Ya Ghaly.’ There’s the hit song ‘Shikdum’ from Dhoom, a copy of Turkish singer Tarkan’s ‘Sikidim.’ And there are more than 20 other songs on that list.
But Chakraborty thrives in a system which pats him on the back and keeps him rolling in guitar picks and muscle shirts. Bollywood rips with style. Why lift an obscure melody when you can steal chartbusters which everyone knows? It’s like that crappy Akshay Kumar flick, a phrase which exists as a redundancy, which ripped the climactic scene from Crash, on the theory that nobody would notice it’s from the Best Picture winner at the Oscars.
Lokhandwala inspired the Black Eyed Peas.
on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007, 9:17 am in Film, Music › 
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Blatantly yes. With style is another matter entirely ;)
Here is a site dedicated to inspirations in Indian film songs http://www.itwofs.com/
Most of the inspirations (or plagiarism) do turn out to be popular hindi/punjabi songs. My favorite one is the Usher inspired - http://youtube.com/watch?v=xLfVyERLM_Y. :)
Despite the inspirations, etc, “Metro” does have a good soundtrack and the movie looks promising (would wait for Manish’s review though).
The link is without the period in the end -
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xLfVyERLM_Y
which Akshay flick is that?
Humko Deewana Kar Gaye.
There are differences, however subtle, among inspiration, fair use and blatant theft. This musician, I am afraid, gives inspiration and fair use a bad name.
hahhaha…so he plagerized that music…well…I guess he kind of makes up for it by singing like a desi jerry garcia, constipated with bhav and passion in the rain of a “gritty” metropolis. anyway…really like this site. come and check out some more desi weirdness, kitch, and comedy at remainsofthedesi.wordpress.com