India’s nightingale Lata Mangeshkar turns 91

Legendary singer Lata Mangeshkar turned 91 on Monday. Born in 1929, she is one of the best-known and most respected playback singers in the country. Several Bollywood celebrities took to social

Legendary singer Lata Mangeshkar turned 91 on Monday. Born in 1929, she is one of the best-known and most respected playback singers in the country.

Several Bollywood celebrities took to social media to extend birthday wishes to the nightingale of Hindi cinema.

Mangeshkar has, in a career spanning over seven decades, recorded songs for over a thousand Hindi films, and in thirty-six regional and foreign languages. A recipient of the Dadasaheb Phalke Award and the Bharat Ratna.

She was 13, when she recorded her first song in 1942. It was for a Marathi movie but was later dropped from the album.

Her last recorded song was in 2015, in an Indo-Pak gay love story. From 1942 to 2015, that’s a record-shattering 73 years of continuous playback and only Mangeshkar, the high priestess of Bollywood singing, could have managed that momentous feat.

For 73 years, and even longer, she has regaled music listeners with her mellifluous voice and in total domination as Bollywood’s leading singer who, like a juggernaut, crushed every competition that came her way.

Film magazines like Stardust had a name for it – the “Mangeshkar monopoly.”

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