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Image Courtesy Divya Bhaskar

He has enthralled three generations. The first two of these occurred while he was still alive and calling shots in the Hindi Cine World. The third one enjoys his voice even now, twenty years after he breathed his last. His voice was magical, his sense of melody unparalleled. Critics named his as the only Midas Voice that had taken place in the Indian playback arena. He had this ability to transform even the mediocre compositions into all-time hits, and used to carry a pleasant addiction of surprising colleagues and fans with raw creativity and talent.

Kishore Kumar gifted the Indian music world with a legacy of unparalleled virtuosity. You could name any of the modern-day virtuosos, be it Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Michael Jackson or any other bigwigs of the 20th century era, and Kishore Kumar would still go in tandem with their class and aura. In fact, the truest of the Desi Listeners had never to be bothered about the above stated stars, since they already had Kishore Kumar on their platter since the early 70s in India. In a country that has always merited the west above itself, Kishoreda is among those rare experiences that defy this Indian pessimism. I, as a Kishore Kumar fan, never felt inferior in crowds that may have been glued to the western style of music, since I knew KK had all in him that they were looking out to get from the English genre.

For someone like me, who grew up listening to Kishore Kumar’s legacy, as a kid in the 70s and as a teenager in the 80s until he breathed his last in 1987, it’s but natural to get connected with his musical legacy at the very first go. However, two other Indian greats and Kishoreda’s contemporaries were also an inherent part of my experiences in those early days. Mohammed Rafi and Mukesh had already set high standards for male playback singing by the time Kishore started taking the Hindi Cinema World by storm purely as a singer. However, he proved out to be a benchmark in his own ways, and the best playback voice to have taken place in the Hindi Cinema World.

The Rafi camp would contest this claim vehemently though, and one respects their grievance, no doubt. However, the sheer size of Kishore Kumar’s fan following is quite mammoth if you checked it out, and it would say a lot in itself. This writer aims at reliving the golden era of Hindi Cinema Music through the memoirs of Kishore Kumar in this blog. It will of course be regarded incomplete if we didn’t speak out about the likes of Mukesh, Rafi, Lata, Asha, Manna Dey, SD Burman, RD Burman and several others along with Kishoreda. We can’t separate out any of these names, if we were truly committed to reliving the golden era of Hindi Cinema Music.

More to follow on Kishore Kumar and Hindi playback singing in the days and weeks to come.