By Asmita Dave

Ahmedabad, Jul 11 (IANS): The slogan 'Jay Jay Garvi Gujarat is derived from the well-known poem of the same name by the 19th-century bard, Narmad (Narmadashankar Labhshankar Dave). The poem, the state anthem of Gujarat, describes the cultural and geographical importance of the state.

A few musical versions exist of the song, but one version made by the tourism department of the Gujarat government in 2010 is the most popular one as it is played at almost all the government programmes and other cultural events. This song was made on the lines of ‘Miley Sur Mera Tumhara' and ‘Baje Sargam'.

Gujarat CM Bhupendra Patel has now launched ‘Jay Jay Garvi Gujarat 2.0', the same song with the same composition and the same productions, but with new artistes.

The CM launched it on the day he launched the Vande Gujarat Campaign and Home Minister Harsh Sanghavi also shared the song on his social media. In older versions of the song there were actors like Manoj Joshi, Paresh Rawal, Apra Mehta and musicians like Ismael Darbar, Shan, Karsan Sagathia, Parthiv Gohil and many Gujarati singers. This time there are only musicians and singers included in the video.

Nishith Mehta is the music composer and artist who has composed and did the music arrangements for both the versions of the song. He has also composed the anthem for the South Asian Games.

He explains, we made an anthem in 2010, which is already popular, there is no need to touch it. But many places have been added and have been changed in these twelve years, generation of artists has changed, so the tourism department thought of recreating it with new flavour.

Talking about the process, Mehta told IANS: "We recreated this song in four days with around 65 artists. It was a challenge for us to recreate something better from an already popular song."

"We have included three generations of artistes in this song. We have included senior artistes as we cannot forget their contribution and included children of the artists as they are the upcoming generation. We have incorporated all the musical art forms of Gujarat, such as folk and semi-classical styles, 'sugam', 'sapaakhra' of the 'chharani' musical style, 'duha' and 'chhand'. Our generation is exposed to hip-hop and rap, so we have the Aghori band, which introduced an element of Gujarati rap."

Nishith Mehta adds, "as we had a short time, we were able to record only around 35 artists, all other artists lip-sync on other artists' voices, I consider that a great thing. It is a real challenge to convince one singer to do lip-sync to another singer's voice. They did it for us putting their egos aside, I am thankful to them. This is a Gujarat Anthem; it's not for any political party."