मेरा बाला जोबन है उदास क्यूँ

MySwar lists 'Mera Bala Joban Hai Udas Kyun' as the first track of the Preet album. Snehprabha Pradhan sings it, Wali Saheb wrote it and Bulo C. Rani composed it. It is one of only three songs on the record with a Wali Saheb lyric.

A slow interrogative lyric of this kind is set to be sung nearly conversationally — the question mark has to survive the melody, which means the phrase has to be allowed to lift at the end rather than resolve. It is the sort of writing that suits a singer whose primary training is in acting rather than in music, and Snehprabha Pradhan was the film's lead actress. No detail of the recording is documented in any consulted source.

Joban is bloom, the physical prime of youth, and baala marks it as young — so the subject of the sentence is not the woman but her own youth, which she then addresses as though it were a separate person who has unaccountably become sad. That is the whole poetic move, and it is a sharp one: it converts a private melancholy into a puzzle the speaker is standing outside of. Wali Saheb builds the line so that the question is unanswerable by design, since youth cannot explain itself. The full text is not reproduced on this page.

HindiGeetMala and MySwar both credit 'Mera Bala Joban Hai Udas Kyun' to Snehprabha Pradhan, with Wali Saheb as lyricist and Bulo C. Rani as composer. Preet was made at Krishin Movietone, the Bombay banner Ram Daryani had set up with his brother K. S. Daryani in 1938, and Daryani directed it himself. Bulo C. Rani composed all thirteen songs; D. N. Madhok wrote ten of them and Wali Saheb the other three. MySwar records the discs as a Columbia Records release. Cinemaazi and the Wikipedia list of 1945 Hindi films give the cast as Snehprabha Pradhan, Chandra Mohan, Nazir Ahmad, Pahari Sanyal, Swarnalata, Gope, Miss Gulab and Majid. No plot summary of the picture survives in any source that can be consulted without a paywall, and the film has no Wikipedia article of its own, so nothing is asserted here about what happens in it.

Snehprabha Pradhan (1915-1993) is credited as the singer on seven of Preet's thirteen tracks — more than any other voice on the record — while also playing the film's female lead. She belongs to the generation of Hindi and Marathi actress-singers whose own voices went onto the discs, in the years just before dedicated playback singing hardened into a separate profession. She later published an autobiography, Snehankita, in the 1970s. Preet itself survives today only as a catalogue: a thirteen-song list preserved through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the databases built on it, with no print known to circulate and no plot summary in open circulation.