My Heart Is Beating: A Dream, a Song, a Fifty-year Echo

For nearly fifty years, a recurring dream carried the memory of a melody and a girl whose name remained elusive. This is the story of how a song from Julie – sung in English, rooted in innocence, and born of cinematic revolution – led Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri back to that moment, that face and that feeling.

‘Ek hi khwab kai baar dekha hai maine’. A song by Gulzar from the film Kinara that has defined a dream I have had about quite another song. For nearly five decades, a single dream visited me like an old friend, familiar, yet elusive. I was eight when I first saw her: a young lady with a gentle smile, strumming a guitar sitting on a modha, and singing at a birthday party. The image stayed with me, suspended in time, vivid as ever. Her face etched into memory, the song incandescent, but everything else a blur. I could never recall her name, not even if it was my birthday – only the haunting sweetness of the melody that lingered each time I woke, just out of reach. Year after year, the dream returned, always ending with a sense of something lost.
Then, in 2024, during the events celebrating the release of Manthan in a new digitally restored print, fate intervened. I met the voice behind that dream, Preeti Sagar, and as she casually began to sing the song, it all came rushing back. The name of the lady in my dream: Meenakshi.

The song: ‘My heart is beating…’

Fifty years ago, in 1975, Julie introduced Indian cinema audiences to a song that would become iconic not just for its melody, but for how radically it broke conventions. Composed by Rajesh Roshan, penned by Harindranath Chattopadhyay, and sung with unmatched grace by Preeti Sagar, ‘My heart is beating’ remains a cultural milestone. Till it came along and took the charts by storm, the only full-length English song in a Hindi film was ‘In the world’s broad field of battle’ from the 1937 film Duniya Na Mane, a rendition of the poem ‘A Psalm of Life’ by H.W. Longfellow, sung in English by Shanta Apte.
At a time when Hindi film songs were dominated by Urdu-Hindi lyrics, traditional orchestrations, and themes of romance rooted in Indian sensibilities, ‘My heart is beating’ took a completely different route. It was sung entirely in English, delivered in a soft, westernized vocal style that mirrored contemporary pop, and presented in the film as an intimate moment of adolescent excitement and budding romance. The visual – the character Julie, played by Lakshmi, caught in the flush of first love – blended beautifully with the lyrics and sound, creating an atmosphere that felt light, fresh and personal.

The Lyrics and the Lyricist

Its lyricist, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, belonged to a distinguished family. His elder sisters were Sarojini Naidu, the poet and freedom fighter, and Suhasini Chattopadhyay, a noted communist leader, while his brother, Virendranath (Chatto) was a prominent Indian revolutionary, part of the Berlin Committee organizing Indian students in Europe against the British. Harindranath, a polymath, carved out his own identity across multiple fields: poetry, theatre, music, cinema, and even politics.
Chattopadhyay began his career as a poet. His early volumes, such as The Feast of Youth (1918), written when he was barely twenty, were well received in English literary circles. He wrote with equal ease in English and in his native Bengali, making him one of the rare bilingual literary voices of his generation. He also had a remarkable gift for children’s verse. His nonsense rhymes and poems written for young readers were full of rhythm, wit and imaginative play. Like Sukumar Ray before him, Harindranath revelled in absurdity, sound patterns and verbal surprises. This body of writing kept alive a tradition of nonsense and playful verse in Indian literature, offering an alternative to didactic children’s writing.
Though literature was his first calling, Harindranath became widely known to the general public through his work in films. Lovers of Hindi cinema will recall him as the crotchety old patriarch in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi. But for connoisseurs of Satyajit Ray films he will probably always be Sidhu Jeytha in Sonar Kella, though he had two other brief but memorable cameos. As Barfi, the evil magician in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), tasked with preparing the many concoctions the wicked prime minister asks him to, he puts in a stellar performance without having to say a word, adding another dimension to the film’s fantastical universe. Then there was Sir Baren in Seemabaddha, who makes quite an impact as the old man ogling at Sharmila Tagore. As Barun Chanda recalls in his book Satyajit Ray: The Man Who Knew Too Much, ‘Sir Baren had made his appearance in a fancy Indonesian print, colourful bush shirt, and made a beeline for our table. My sister-in-law, Sudarshana, is duly introduced to him, inviting the inevitable wordplay on her name. But the way he ogles at her from a distance spoils the lunch for her … That Ray liked him enormously is evident. And that he was given full freedom to do as he pleased was also evident in this film. Though tiny in size, Harindranath more than made up for that with his deliberately larger-than-life gestures. This would raise titters in the audience whenever he appeared on screen.’

Perhaps Harindranath’s most enduring contribution to popular culture came in the form of ‘Rail gaadi’, the famous song from Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Aashirwad (1968). Sung by Ashok Kumar in the film and set to music by Vasant Desai, the song was written in a playful, rhythmic style by Harindranath. Its rolling cadence – imitating the movement of a train – made it an instant hit. Today, it is sometimes described as India’s ‘first rap song’, given its spoken-word rhythm, absence of conventional melody, and emphasis on beat and wordplay. Long before rap and hip-hop became global phenomena, Harindranath had intuited the power of rhythm and rhyme as performance.
What made the song even more special was its link to his larger body of children’s writing. It could easily have been one of his nonsense rhymes, its onomatopoeic train sounds and humorous repetition designed to delight children. By transplanting that style into a mainstream Hindi film, Harindranath blurred the boundaries between ‘serious’ literature, ‘children’s’ verse, and popular entertainment.

The remarkable thing about ‘My heart is beating’ is that these words came from a man who was, at the time, almost eighty years old. Chattopadhyay, known for his philosophical poetry, his children’s verse, and his deep engagement with Indian culture, turned out lines that carried the voice not of an elderly poet but of a young girl in love. That paradox – the age of the poet and the freshness of the lyric – lends the song an additional layer of wonder.
At a time when Hindi film music was dominated by orchestral richness, full-throated playback singing, and lyrics steeped in metaphor and poetry, here was a song in English, sung in a natural voice, set to an airy, Western-style arrangement. The result was a piece that was not only unusual but also startlingly modern, so much so that it continues to sound fresh half a century later. The song is direct, conversational, and utterly unadorned. ‘My heart is beating, keeps on repeating, I’m waiting for you’, the opening lines go, with none of the heavy metaphor or literary flourish one might expect from a Hindi film lyric. In the simplest possible words, the song expresses anticipation, longing and joy – feelings that are at the very core of youthful love.
Julie tells the story of a young Anglo-Indian girl and her relationship with a Hindu boy. The English lyrics situate the heroine firmly in her cultural milieu: English is her natural tongue, the idiom in which her inner feelings might first express themselves. That the words were written in English, rather than translated or adapted from a Hindi original, gives the song a rare authenticity. It does not feel imposed or artificial but rather flows from the character’s own being. The English song does not feel like a gimmick but like a natural outpouring of Julie’s identity. When Lakshmi, as Julie, lip-syncs to Preeti Sagar’s voice, the effect is one of complete believability: this is a girl expressing herself in the language she lives in. The song thus enhances character, deepens realism, and grounds the narrative in lived experience.

The Composer and the Composition

Yet the lyrics alone do not account for the enduring charm of the song. Just as important is the orchestration and musical arrangement devised by Rajesh Roshan. If one listens closely, one is struck by how spare and uncluttered the sound is. There is none of the lush layering of violins and heavy percussion that defined so much of Hindi film music of the time. Instead, what one hears is almost a pop-folk arrangement, closer to Western music than to the filmi idiom.
The acoustic guitar provides the steady strumming that anchors the entire song, its rhythmic consistency giving the music its heartbeat, in keeping with the theme. Percussion, in the form of bongos or congas, is light, almost playful, never overwhelming the voice. The trumpet, with its brief interjections, adds brightness and a touch of whimsy, while strings are used sparingly, not to dominate but to colour the background. It is as if Roshan deliberately avoided the weightiness of traditional orchestration to allow the song to float free, mirroring the lightness of a girl’s heart in love.
This stylistic choice was not accidental. Rajesh Roshan, still in the early years of his career, showed here a remarkable sense of restraint. He borrowed from Western folk-pop, using a harmonic structure that was unusual in Hindi cinema. The progression of chords, the interplay between guitar and flute, the overall lightness of the arrangement, all speak to an openness to global musical influences. Yet he did not mimic Western pop wholesale; the song retains a distinct individuality, a gentle hybridity that was perfectly suited to the narrative.

The Voice of the Song

Equally crucial to the song’s impact was the vocal performance of Preeti Sagar. Hers was not the trained, polished, full-bodied voice of Lata Mangeshkar or Asha Bhosle, who had dominated playback singing for decades. Instead, she brought a natural, breathy freshness, with an almost conversational tone. Her accent, far from being a flaw, gave the performance authenticity. One feels, listening to her, not that a playback singer is interpreting a song but that a young woman is singing her own feelings, shyly and joyfully, perhaps even a little self-consciously. This was a dramatic shift in Hindi cinema, where playback voices were usually stylized and larger-than-life. Sagar’s performance made the song feel intimate, personal and real.
What also stands out in Sagar’s rendition is the restraint she brings to the song. There is no vocal flamboyance or excessive ornamentation. Her delivery is simple, even minimalist, yet deeply expressive. The pauses, the slight tremble in certain phrases, the soft giggle at the edges of her voice, all contribute to a mood that is both tender and youthful. In many ways, her voice mirrors the emotional uncertainty and tentative happiness of first love, aligning perfectly with the onscreen visuals. It was this honesty and subtlety that gave the song its staying power, while marking a departure from the prevalent mode of playback singing of the era.

The Song in Hindi Film History

Taken together – the lyrics, the orchestration, the arrangement and the vocal quality – the song achieved something rare: it captured the innocence and immediacy of first love without resorting to either the melodrama of traditional film songs or the self-conscious sophistication of Western pop. Its charm lay in its lightness, its refusal to be heavy-handed.
What also makes it so special is the way it fits within and yet stands apart from the musical culture of the 1970s. Hindi cinema at that time was in a period of flux. The grand musical traditions of the 1950s and 1960s were still alive but beginning to give way to newer sounds. R.D. Burman was at his experimental peak, fusing Western rock, jazz and Latin elements into Hindi film songs. Kalyanji-Anandji and Laxmikant-Pyarelal were continuing to produce big, orchestrally rich scores. Into this landscape stepped Rajesh Roshan, a relatively new composer, who with Julie announced his presence. While the film had several hit songs – ‘Dil kya kare’ and ‘Bhool gaya sab kuch’ among them – it was ‘My heart is beating’ that felt like a true innovation.
Over the decades, the song has also acquired a cultural resonance that goes beyond the film. It has become, for many, a symbol of youthful openness, of the breaking of barriers between East and West, of a moment in Indian cinema when experimentation was possible. It is not remembered for grandeur or for technical virtuosity but for its freshness. For countless listeners, it evokes the simplicity of young love, that moment when the heart races and words tumble out without adornment.

The Enduring Legacy

In reflecting on what makes ‘My heart is beating’ so special, one must finally return to its spirit of innocence. There is something guileless about the song, something unpretentious. It does not try to impress with poetic complexity, nor does it overwhelm with orchestral density. Instead, it allows a simple feeling to find its natural expression. In doing so, it reminds us that music at its best need not always be grand or elaborate; sometimes, the most enduring songs are those that speak plainly, lightly and honestly.
The uniqueness of the song lies in its subtlety and sophistication. It did not try to emulate Western pop forcefully, nor did it abandon the emotional tenor of Hindi film songs. Instead, it struck a delicate balance. Preeti Sagar’s smooth, unaffected singing gave the song its soul, and her voice became instantly recognizable. For many listeners, ‘My heart is beating’ was their first encounter with an English song in a Hindi film that wasn’t a parody or comic relief – it was sincere, serious and musically refined. Even today, its gentle guitar strumming, warm vocals, and evocative lyrics stir a sense of nostalgia among those who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s.
Culturally, the song also symbolized a broader shift. Though the film has not aged well – with its cliché-ridden depiction of the Anglo-Indian/Christian community – Julie dealt with bold themes for its time: interfaith romance, teenage pregnancy, and the trials of a single mother. The song’s English lyrics and modern styling echoed the cosmopolitan identity of the protagonist Julie, a young Anglo-Indian girl caught between traditional values and modern feelings. The song thus served not just as a musical moment but also as a character statement.
Fifty years on, it remains more than just a love song. It is a cultural landmark. It brought English lyrics into the mainstream of Hindi cinema without losing emotional authenticity. In its simplicity, modernity and warmth, the song captured a timeless human feeling – falling in love – and gave Indian film music one of its most graceful and ground-breaking moments. It continues to stand out, not merely for its novelty but because of the peculiar lightness of touch and authenticity with which it conveyed youthful innocence and first love.
Today, as I think of the song and the dream I have carried for years, I think of Meenakshi (I cannot help wonder where she is; she will never know how inextricably the song is linked with her in my memory). She is probably well into her seventies now, yet in my mind’s eye as young and ethereal as she was that luminous day as she sang ‘My heart is beating’. That is the enduring gift of Rajesh Roshan, Harindranath Chattopadhyay and Preeti Sagar in this collaboration. They created a song that broke conventions, that opened up new possibilities, and yet did so with such effortless charm that it never feels forced. It remains, fifty years later, a song that, in conveying ‘time is fleeting’, brings time to a standstill and still makes the heart beat a little faster.