तय करके बड़ी दूर की पुरपेच डगरिया

The second Mukesh solo in Pehli Nazar, and the one usually overshadowed by the film's famous debut number. hindigeetmala and MySwar both credit it to Mukesh alone, with Anil Biswas composing and Safdar Aah Sitapuri writing. hindigeetmala records the sequence as picturised on an ensemble that includes Motilal, Veena, Munawwar Sultana, Cuckoo and Bibbo.

Anil Biswas sets the title's travelling image to a measured, unhurried gait — the composer's habitual preference in 1945 for letting a singer's phrasing, rather than the orchestra, carry the weight of a lyric.

Safdar Aah Sitapuri's title image is of a road deliberately chosen and already long since crossed — 'purpech dagariya', a twisting lane. It is the Urdu-Hindi film lyric's familiar figure of a life measured as a journey, with the turns standing in for the choices.

Pehli Nazar was directed and produced by Mazhar Khan for Mazhar Art Productions, with Anil Biswas as music director and Safdar Aah Sitapuri as the film's sole credited lyricist. Mukesh sang four of the film's ten catalogued songs, two of them as solos; this is the second of those solos.

It survives mainly as evidence of how much of Mukesh's mature manner was already in place at the very start — the same unhurried delivery and plain-spoken ache that would define him for the next three decades.