Mile Sur Mera Tumhara
Lok Seva Sanchar Parishad / Doordarshan1988
Mile Sur Mera Tumhara is a 1988 six-minute public service film for television for Lok Seva Sanchar Parishad / Doordarshan, created by Ogilvy & Mather (Ogilvy Benson & Mather), India.
The line
Mile sur mera tumhara, to sur bane hamara (When my note and yours meet, they become our note)
Why it works
Pandit Bhimsen Joshi sings a phrase in Raga Bhairavi beside a waterfall, and the same melody travels through fourteen languages, landscapes and faces, from film stars and sporting heroes to ordinary Indians, until it resolves into the closing notes of the national anthem. Commissioned by Lok Seva Sanchar Parishad, a public-service body promoted by Doordarshan, it was conceived by Ogilvy's creative head Suresh Mullick, directed by Kailash Surendranath, and given lyrics by a young Piyush Pandey, then in client servicing, whose eighteenth draft was approved. It is studied as the high point of India's national-integration films: an advertising agency packaging a country's diversity into a single tune whose message is unity rather than flag-waving. First broadcast on Doordarshan straight after the Prime Minister's Independence Day speech on 15 August 1988, it became an unofficial second anthem and is still aired on national holidays more than three decades later.
Techniques
- Jingles and music One melody passes through fourteen languages and many voices, letting the song itself carry the idea that India's differences make one tune.
- Purpose and cause A public-service film for national integration presents the country's diversity as unity, resolving into the closing notes of the national anthem.
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