ऐ बावले मन क्या करूँ

Wikipedia, Hindi Geet Mala and MySwar all carry this title among the songs of Kurukshetra (1945), all three with Pandit Ganpat Rao's music and Jameel Mazhari's words, and all three with the singer column empty. No recording is known. The title is an address to one's own mind, called baavla - foolish, half-mad - and a question put to it that expects no answer.

Pandit Ganpat Rao - Ganapatrao Gurav, a Kirana gharana vocalist from Ratnagiri district who was among the first batch of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan's disciples and served for years as a court musician at Jamkhandi - scored only two films in his life, Kurukshetra and Bebus (1950), before returning to the concert platform. No copy of this recording is accessible, so its scoring, voice and tempo are unknown and are left unfilled here rather than guessed at.

Baavla is a word with affection in it. To call the mind foolish is not to condemn it but to acknowledge that it keeps wanting what it cannot have, and the question that follows - what am I to do - is addressed as much to the self as to the mind. It belongs to the same family of devices as the film's other Hindi-register songs, in which Jameel Mazhari, an Urdu poet by training and reputation, consistently treats the mann as a separate person to be reasoned with. Beyond the title the text is lost.

Kurukshetra (1945) was made by Unity Productions of Calcutta and directed by Rameshwar Sharma, whose entire filmography runs to three titles for the same banner. It welds the Mahabharata to a modern social story: documented plot descriptions have it open on a contemporary strand about social workers campaigning against idleness before moving into the epic proper - the Draupadi swayamvar, the humiliation in the sabha, and the march to the war at Kurukshetra - cutting between the two registers and drawing lessons from the Bhagavad Gita as answers to national problems. K.L. Saigal played Karna. Two of the film's thirteen documented songs, this one and Karmphal Ki Soch Mat Kar, have no singer attached in any accessible listing; a third, unnamed song is implied by the count of fourteen given in the fullest published account of the film.

None. The entry exists to keep the soundtrack honest: this is a documented song of the film, and leaving it out would make the record look tidier than it is.