IF you have managed to keep the child within you alive, you will smile, tap your toes, sway a li’l and hum along with the bubbly voice chirping “Akkad Bakkad Bambe Bo” or “Chanda Mama Door Ke” …If you are a Marathi ‘manoos’, every purple cloud will inspire you to tell the peacock “Naach re Moraa, naach!”
IF you have (of course you have) known those ‘chatpataa’ pangs of first love, your ‘ever-after’ dreams have been definitely punctuated by “Isharon isharon mein dil lenewaale” the promising “Aao huzoor tumko sitaaron mein le chaloon” and without doubt, by “Chura Liya hai Tumne jo Dil ko”
IF you have also been dismantled by rejection, heartbreak, your all-time lows must have found an echo in “Chain se humko kabhi aap ne jeene naa diya” or the desolate“Ab ke Baras bhejo Bhaiyya ko Baabul”
AND ( shhhh)… IF the svelte Helen’s iconic cabaret number “Piya tu….ab to aaja” still plays the same tricks on your pulse as it did decades ago, then You, like zillions the world over, are just like Me-moaning “Abhi na jaao chodkar”, not willing to let go of Ashatai Bhosle- this one-woman ‘Utsav’ who bid a crisp, no-fuss adieu (with just one night at the hospital following a cardiac arrest), at an incredibly young 92!
Celebrating Asha is like raising a glass of bubbly to wow the effervescent ease or the slow-burning anguish with which her unique voice swept across, enhanced, impacted and immortalised all seasons of life. How? “I try to infuse ‘jaan’ into every song, make it mine”, she explained, adding how her infallible mentor , that ‘single-edition’ all-time great – S.D.Burman had told her to carefully watch the personality, body language, dress sense, mannerisms et al of an actor before singing for her.
But sometimes, that can distract too, confessed my candid and sprightly idol when she revealed that she found Helen so pretty that she had not only told her not to come to the studio when she was recording, she had also declared that she would have wooed Helen mercilessly had she been a man, O yes!
That was Asha for you- never mincing her words nor masking her innermost feelings. “I am loved because all of you feel I am one of you, not a celebrity with airs and a put-on attitude. Yes, I have gone through a lot of suffering, worked hard to make money so that my three children could get a good life. But I have always invested my best effort in whatever I did…finishing all the housework by 10.30am before going to the studio and then trying my best to ensure that there is not a single slip in the recording. Even today I feel anxious before a show because I want to live up to all the expectations of my listeners,” she once told a cheering audience who clearly adored their “Ashatai”.
This is why our earthbound Virgoan who has sung over 12,000 songs in 20 Indian languages across seven-plus decades and bagged a Guiness for being the most-recorded artist in music history, could transform into a homespun hostess and give me an invaluable tip for life: “I like to cook a variety of dishes for my guests. After the first serving which I like to do myself, I put all the dishes on the table and vanish for a while saying I have some urgent calls to make or giving some such excuse. You know why? That makes each person take as much as he or she wants of anything they like without feeling self-conscious.” Makes sense?
In spite of making your senses tingle, swim or drown in the mood of the moment through all the ‘hits’ flowing out of her velvet voice, Asha revealed in a freshly unearthed interview done for BBC that her favourite song was an atypical, non-filmi rendition penned by Bharat Vyas ji and composed by (hold your breath!) the late world-renowned percussion maestro par excellence – Padma Vibhushan Pandit Nikhil Ghosh. The mukhda of this heartrending lyric which captures the essential loneliness of a crowd-swamped artist, reads-
Geet kitne gaa chuki hoon iss sukhi jag ke liye
Aaj rone do mujhe, pal ek apne bhi liye
(I have rendered innumerable songs for this complacent world. Let me, today, weep for a moment, for my own self)
My awe and adoration for this many-splendoured diva stems from a deep awareness of how many intra-personal and interpersonal conflicts this gifted woman glided in and out of before touching the sky! Being one among four sisters, living in the shadow of the towering persona of a supremely talented Didi who was also the breadwinner, trying to hang on to a failing marriage through the travails of motherhood, while trying to get a foothold in the music world without sounding like a weak imitation.. None of these challenges were easy to triumph over.
But our rebel was made of sterner stuff. She could walk into a men’s saloon (“there were no beauty parlours uss zamaane mein” ) and have her bountiful locks chopped off just to be different. But she also had the gumption to withstand the severe thrashing that followed from an irate Aai who just could not figure out what made this daughter alone dance to a different tune altogether. A few years later, Lata Didi just could not make this iconoclast understand why Ganpatrao Bhosle was not “a suitable boy”. But again, while she eloped with her dubious suitor, and got cut off from the family as a result, she also struggled all by herself managing home and hearth, two children and a shaky hold in the music industry for a long while till she finally walked out of had become an ugly and abusive marriage and returned home, pregnant with her second son ( who would later became the manager of her booming career). But of course,when she was firmly established in the chosen niche of her unstoppable genius to adapt her voice to every genre- a folk song or a lavani, a soul-stirring song of passion or betrayal, an abhang or a regional nursery rhyme anything, everything with elan and perfection, she was able to dismiss every controversy with yet another chartbuster. So grapevine murmurs about sibling rivalry, her ‘happening’ connect with O.P Nayyar and later, her marriage to the younger Pancham ( R.DBurman) did not hinder or halt the dizzy speed of her spiralling success. She was even able to quip that her happy marriage to RD was because they were irresistibly united in their shared passion for music and food! In short, this icon mastered the art of tapping the unbounded talent and Shakti within to sculpt an exclusive and all-inclusive id. “Every woman has this inner Shakti to achieve the ‘impossible’. Without Shakti by his side, Shiva is reduced to a mere Shava (a lifeless being) ,” she declared, more than once.
I once asked Ashatai which song from her unlimited treasury of film renditions was closest to her heart…She revealed it was that haunting number, written by Gulzar and filmed on Anooradha Patel for Ijaazat – Mera kuchh samaan , tumhaare paas padaa hai..
That timeless song is a priceless metaphor for the invaluable bits and pieces that one leaves behind in a relationship that has since become dysfunctional.
That song, Ashatai, carries the story of every psyche you touched in your long and spectacular journey… You may have winged away with a precious bit of our mourning hearts yes, but, as long as your sensational voice continues to stream over hundreds of platforms, you will come alive over and over again within each one of us…
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