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The Lata Factor!

As India’s Nightingale, the legendary Lata Mangeshkar rings in her 88th birthday today, here’s celebrating a few high notes of her illustrious life…

Hema Mangeshkar, anyone? That was the original name India’s most famous playback singer was given at the time of her birth on September 28, 1929 in Indore. Later her parents chose to rename her Lata after Latika, a female character in one of father’s plays, Bhaaw Bandhan.

Her father Deenanath Mangeshkar, a classical singer and theatre actor, was her first teacher. At the age of five she started to work as an actress in her father's musicals. Already a seasoned little songstress, she started to teach the kids in her class singing on her very first day in school. Berated by her teacher, she thereafter refused to go to school altogether!

Mentored by music director Ghulam Haider, after the death of her original supporter Master Vinayak, she was introduced by him to producer Sashadhar Mukherjee. The latter, however, dismissed her voice as being “too thin”. A piqued Haider retorted that in the coming years filmmakers would "fall at Lata's feet" and "beg her" to sing in their movies.

In the course of a career that started in 1942 and has spanned more than seven decades, she has recorded songs for over a thousand Hindi films and has sung songs in over thirty-six regional Indian languages and foreign languages, though mainly in Marathi and Hindi. A recipient of numerous awards, she is also the second vocalist, after M. S. Subbulakshmi, to have ever been awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2001, India's highest civilian honour

Of her infamous rivalry with sister Asha Bhosle, she maintains that they are sisters first and foremost, and forever. “We had our own individual space as singers... She can sing every kind of song. Thank god she didn’t adopt my style of singing. If she had we’d have become competition for one another. She went on her own path.”

 

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