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Lata Mangeshkar

New music directors are scared of me

“I have always followed my music directors’ instructions but it is only my brother Pandit Hridaynath who has the guts to tell me where I go wrong,”

Melody queen Lata Mangeshkar does not consider herself a “great singer” but so scares her new music directors that they refrain from pointing out her mistakes.

“I have always followed my music directors’ instructions but it is only my brother Pandit Hridaynath who has the guts to tell me where I go wrong,” she said. Of the new crop of music directors, she said that she considers A. R. Rehman and Vishal the best.

Lata said hates the way women are portrayed in Hindi films but hesitates to talk about it for fear of being labelled “old fashioned”. She made these candid remarks while speaking at a function organised by the Indian Merchants Chamber here last evening.

Lata, now 70, said she had a close relationship with Mukesh, Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi and Hemant Kumar— her contemporaries in the Sixties and the Seventies. “We worked in complete understanding,” she said. As a woman in a man’s world, she said she encountered many difficulties but “it is in our hands to find a way out.”

Lata took the audience on a nostalgic trip when she narrated her first encounter with Kishore Kumar, who was on the same local train as Lata, sitting opposite her. Both of them did not know each other. And Lata said she thought he was following her. When he “followed” right into the studio where she was to record, Lata ran upto music director Khemchand Prakash to complain about this “boy”, only to be told that he was Kishore Kumar, the brother of the then superstar, Ashok Kumar.

Lata also spoke about her first meeting with the legendary music director Naushad and recalled how he had asked her to sing a ghazal. She realised only later that he wanted to test her Urdu pronounciation.

Responding to playback singer Yesudas’ suggestion that she should take up classical singing, Lata said if time and her health permit her to do her riyaaz, she would certainly like to start classical singing.

Rajiv Vijayakar