In the highly competitive arena of Hindi film music, to leave a mark of your own itself is such a huge task, leave apart becoming the Numero Uno. And to maintain the top position for years together is even tougher. With the industry studded with innumerable musical talents in the Golden Era of Film Music- from 50s to 70s- there had been a privileged few who, with the Good God’s Grace, were distinctly genius.
Who can be called a Genius? Can we safely define him as a person who can perform a task to the perfection without ever learning the general and widely acknowledged process of performance and developing a new process of his own! So, if sending a cricket ball outside the boundary with a Willow Bat is a task, Sunil Gavaskar learnt the process of accomplishing that task traditionally by studying and practising, while Viv Richards developed a process of his own! And the path followed by the Genius is also very difficult to follow by others- resulting in limited number of genius and more number of traditional students, as a law of nature. Not that Sunny is lesser than Viv by any circumstances; we can still safely give the crown of a “Master” to the former and the crown of a “Genius” to the latter.
Never follow the path of a non-conformist- warn the traditionalists! You might mess it all up and end up at nowhere. And people to be on the safer side, follow that instruction also.
So, when Pandit Ajay Chakraborty of the Patiala gharana mentions in an interview that he was highly influenced by the singing style of Kishore Kumar and Manna De, you can't help getting stunned! As the latter can be safely called the Sunil Gavaskar or Rahul Dravid of Hindi playback singing, the former has always been a Viv Richards or Virendra Sehwag- people awed at him in appreciation sometimes and criticizing him outright some other times.
But the fact is what Ajay Chakraborty depicts indirectly- Kishore Kumar and his style of singing is present generation’s obsession. What do they follow about Kishore- a man who sang more than 3000 songs in a career of 40 years without having any formal musical training? What aspect of this amateur singer’s singing could have attracted people like Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Pandit Ajay Chakraborty, Prince Rama Verma to Satyajit Ray, Lata Mangeshkar to an entire generation of young and aspiring singers? Even a trained Rabindrasangeet singer Suchitra Mitra, who had taken training under the Great Poet himself, sent a letter full of praises to this maverick singer after listening to his album of Rabindrasangeets?
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| National Award winning director Sandip Ray made a comprehensive documentory on Kishore Kumar |
