An Excerpt From my Book and Diary, On 13th May, 2010
It is very hard to flashback two decades old memories, but I’ll try my best to portray them. It was an uninteresting and droning evening somewhere around mid of 80’s. My dad was posted in Azad Kashmir and then to Siachen. We were staying at our grandparents place in Baffa. Life was quite slow and boring at the village house, with little creativity and almost no entertainment for young kids. Village folks use to have food around 8pm and went to sleep around 9pm. Television transmission programs used to be so dreary and unenjoyable for young kids.
One evening, we were watching local television routine transmission. It aired a song with four teenage boys, holding musical instruments and singing in an entirely new style. We kept watching the song called “DIL DIL Pakistan” and didn’t move until the song finished. “WOW, that was amazing”, ejaculated my little 4-year old brother, “I love it’. I had the same notions as well. They just mentioned the singers’ names. They later came to be known as “Vital Signs”, a top-notch and first official band of Pakistan. They produced some more hits like “Chehra”, “Tum Mil Gaye”, “Gorey”, “Sanwali Saloni”, but “Dil Dil Pakistan” was a sky rocket hit, which brought them under the limelight. National songs aired those days were usually picturized indoor in PTV studios. “Dil Dil Pakistan” set a totally novel trend in the history of Pakistani patriotic songs. It was something stunning for the new generation. When my dad came from Siachen, we insisted on buying a cassette of Vital Signs. “But how are you going to listen to the song? You don’t have a music player.” He replied.
We later came to know about all the four enigmatic boys of the band. Shehzad Hasan was light-eyed, camera-shy bassist, and an energetic Rohail Hyatt was on the keyboards. They worked really hard on the song and it was rated “The World’s 3rd most popular song” by BBC World in 2003. It is indeed a highly patriotic song. Later Nusrat Hussain (guitarist) was replaced by Salman Ahmad, a student at medical College. Vital signs kept producing rocking hits like “Aisa Na ho”, “Rahi”, “Yehi Zameen”, “Hum Tum” and “Aitebar”. Their videos even sketched swinging moods, ranging from ecstasy to extreme angst. “Dil Dil Pakistan” showed patriotism, “Tum mil Gaye” depicted marital failure and ending relationships. “Wo kuan thi” depicted a typical college boy’s flirtatious attitude, with writing love letters, standing outside college gates, and talking to girls on the phone. “Gorey” and “Sanwali Saloni” had cultural roots, shot in Kailash and Thar. All of these were luminously directed. One thing I liked about their videos was that females were never exploited. They even used to model in their own videos and almost eighty percent of the videos were picturized without any female models. Even then they were big miraculous hits. Videos like “Wo Kon thi”, “Yehi zameen”, “Chehra”, “Do pal”, “Aise Hum Jiyen”, “Mera dil” and “Dil Dil Pakistan” didn’t have even a single female model.
My younger brother was so inspired that he decided to play the cover for “Dil Dil” on his Parents’ Day in 1989. He asked us to get the same kind of jeans and shirt, that Junaid was wearing in the song and a small guitar as well. For the whole night he kept practicing the song, though he was so young that couldn’t utter words properly.
In 1993, the band came with an amazing program named “Guitar 93”. I remember it used to be my favorite program and next day in school, we used to discuss their songs and hum during the recess.
Even today, almost after two decades, they have a huge list of fans, listening to their songs and playing covers. They managed to create relishing and mesmerizing music in a highly islamized era, where there wasn’t any concept of concerts and shows, Vital signs had euphoria and charisma of their own. They were different individuals with their unique set of traits. The band produced only four albums in its eleven years, with some of the songs going dreadful flops. Towards the end of 90’s, the members started drifting away and shifted their core energies to different fields. They are still legends, but the way they set a fresh trend in a dictatorship epoch, was distinctly appraising. Even today, little is known about the band’s disbanding reasons, but they will always be admired by millions of aficionados all over the world.
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