My Name Is Anthony Gonsalves (song)

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.

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, "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".