My Name Is Anthony Gonsalves (song)

"My name Is Anthony Gonsalves"
Song by Kishore Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan
from the album Amar Akbar Anthony
Released1977
RecordedMumbai, 1977
GenreFilm score
Songwriter(s)Anand Bakshi
Composer(s)Laxmikant–Pyarelal

"My Name is Anthony Gonsalves" is a song from the 1977 Hindi film Amar Akbar Anthony. One unusual feature of this song is that the actor featured in its picturization, Amitabh Bachchan, provides vocals along with Kishore Kumar. Amitabh speaks and Kumar sings. It is shown in a sequence which in a reception, Anthony (Bachchan) sings and performs to be close to Jenny (Parveen Babi), for which her bodyguard keeps him away from her.[1][2]

The song was composed by duo Laxmikant–Pyarelal. The character Anthony Gonsalves is named after Anthony Gonsalves, a music teacher of Pyarelal Ramprasad Sharma who was one of the most famous music arrangers in Bombay in the 1930s. He had among his students the likes of RD Burman apart from Pyarelal.[3]

Special effects are used for comic purposes in the picturisation of this song.

The opening line, "You are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity", that is spoken by Anthony when he emerges from the Easter egg, is an almost exact quotation from a speech in the Parliament of the United Kingdom given by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in 1878. Disraeli (who was referring to William Ewart Gladstone) used the word "inebriated" rather than "intoxicated".[4] Anthony Gonsalves was also the name of the arranger for the famous music director Salil Chaudhary.[5]

  1. ^ Hey My Heart, Show Me
  2. ^ BBC Asian Network Top 40 Soundtracks of All Time #36 - link dead 27 May 2007 (Archived 13 March 2005 at the Wayback Machine)
  3. ^ "The 'Real' Anthony Gonsalves!". Archived from the original on 23 December 2007. Retrieved 26 September 2006.
  4. ^ Institute for the Study of Western Civilization: The Long Century - Eminent victorians
  5. ^ "Interview with Milon Gupta (Bengali with English sub titles) - You tube". Posted by RamanaRaaga. 24 November 2013.