My Name Is Anthony Gonsalves (song)


"My Name is Anthony Gonsalves" is a popular comic song from the 1977 Bollywood film Amar Akbar Anthony. One unusual feature of this song is that the actor featured in its picturization, Amitabh Bachchan, provides vocals along with the playback singer Kishore Kumar. Amitabh speaks and Kishore Kumar sings. It is shown in a sequence which in a reception, Anthony sings and performs to be close to Jenny, for which her bodyguard keeps him away from her.
The song was composed by duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal. The character Anthony Gonsalves is named after 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.
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 used the word "inebriated" rather than "intoxicated". Anthony Gonsalves was also the name of the arranger for the famous music director Salil Chaudhary.