Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Recalling an interview on TV with Lata Mangeshkar

I was reading some coverage of the felicitations of the Indian cricket team for having won the world cup. Of course no one expected them to win. Every victory seemed like their last. But that didn't stop the ministers and the who's who to bask in refelcted glory.

The incident I was reminded of was what Lata Mangeshkar -- who if you don't know about happens to be the female voice of just about any Indian film song you heard from 1950 to 1980 -- recounted in a TV interview.

Lata had sung a "patriotic" song during the Indo-China war days in 1962 for India's prime minister Jawahar Lal Nehru. As it happened, Nehru was deeply touched by the song, and shed a tear. Lata was hurriedly called back to meet Nehru after the performance, and Nehru told her that she had made him cry. This incident became a huge rage. And it spun off a weird fad. Whenever Lata was performing live at a show, ministers and babus would sit in the front row, and have her perform the same song she did for Nehru. And... they would cry.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's not every Indian film , its every Hindi film song. Indian films are much more - Tamil,Telugu,Kannada,Bengali,etc etc. Posting anonymosly because this isnt such a big deal,but yeah,I correct everyone who tries to project Indian films = Bollywood.