The tinsel world of show business advertises everything but is tight-lipped about the actual amounts that change hands.
In the process, she has reportedly earned fabulous riches, only a rough estimate of which is possible. That adds up to 14,050 songs, not to speak of at least 500 songs in her private records. This fact, in itself, should imply that she has out sung her closest rival, the late Mohammed Rafi. Since 1974, though foreign tours have been interfering with her singing in India, she has still managed 150 songs in a year. But industry sources aver that she had sung 300 songs on an average in each of the first five years of her career.ĥ00 songs annually during the next 23 years. Record Numbers: She might not have recorded all the 26,000 songs that Guinness had earlier said. It is doubtful if any man has matched her output, though the publishers of Guinness Book of Records, caught in a maelstrom of controversy a few years ago, have dropped from their latest issue the earlier claim that she indeed held the world record. No woman in the world has cut as many discs as Lata, at 51, has. As Shanker of the famed Shanker-Jaikishen music director duo put it: "Lataji catches cold, and the whole industry sneezes." One imperious frown from her sends the country's highest paid music directors in a panic.Ī single disapproving shake of her head makes the top brass of internationally connected record companies grow cold feet. Latabai Mangeshkar, who, as a playback singer, enjoys today a clout which even the movie moguls of the country's Rs 100-crore film industry cannot dream of. The "masseur" of this all-pervading music, and the queen-empress of India's immensely popular light music industry, is a portly, dark, camera shy, plain-as-Jane Marathi woman. If Marshall McLuhan, the communication wizard, were still alive and called upon to cast an eye across his "global village" -to India's music scene, he might have paid homage to the voice with the new phrase: "music is the massage". The voice, like Mahatma Gandhi's loin cloth and Rabindranath Tagore's beard, has become a part of India's collective unconscious. It is the voice to which the roadside vendor in Delhi has transacted his business, the long-distance trucker has sped along the highway, the Army jawan in Ladakh has kept guard at his frontier bunker, or the glittering elite of Bombay have dined in luxury hotels. The voice, like the blithe spirit of music, has wafted far and wide.
It has greeted them on the radio and television, record-player and tape-recorder. It has chased them wherever they have gone at film shows, restaurants, hairdressers, carnivals, beach parties, Durga Puja pandals. Delightfully high, the notes rendered clearly to the last bar, the words pronounced with a rare panache the voice has haunted Indians for over three decades. Lata Mangeshkar: The voice that can't be missedIt is the voice that no Indian can miss.
0 kommentar(er)
