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Happy Birthday Lata Mangeshkar: The Nightingale of India Lata Mangeshkar, popularly called Lata Didi turns 89 today. Last year in my birthday tribute on Koimoi, i had focussed on rare trivia regarding her life and career. This year on her birthday, I bring to you Some Lata-Kishore da trivia as well as some trivia on her great love for the game of cricket.
Lata Didi and Kishore da were probably the best ever singing pair. It is symbolic of their greatness and closeness too that when the Lata Mangeshkar Award was a national level award started in 1984 with various state Governments authorised to give this award and the Madhya Pradesh Government started it, Kishore Da was the second recipient of the award (with Naushad being the 1st) . After Kishore Da received it, MP Government started Kishore Kumar Award for contribution to Hindi cinema. What a fitting tribute to the two geniuses.
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Lata Ji once took an interview of Kishore Da which u can see on the Facebook page of talented singer Sonu Nigam. This had been shared by Amit Kumar with Sonu. In this interview Kishore Da and Lata didi discuss their common “Guru” K.L.Saigal. Dada said that singing gives him more pleasure than acting or composing, especially as he feels that acting is “Jhoothi” while singing is from the heart.
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India has two passions, movies and cricket, and Lata didi has a very close association with cricket as well. BCCI President Raj Singh Dungarpur was her close friend. India 1st won the world Cup in 1983 and before the final, Lata didi hosted a dinner for the team. She watched the finals at Lords, and after India won the world cup, captain Kapil Dev invited her to have a dinner at the team hotel. Later, she performed free at a concert and 20 Lakhs was raised and every team member was given 1 Lakh each. Those days there was not much money in cricket, when one notes that the players of the 2011 World Cup winning team got 2 crores each.
Didi has a special relationship with Sachin Tendulkar whom she considers her son and he calls her mother. Much before the cricketer got a Bharat Ratna which she had got, she used to publicly always say that he deserved one. Sachin’s birthday, on 24th April is her dad’s death anniversary and hence she is sad that on Sachin’s special day, she cant meet him. The 2018 IPL Final was held at Mumbai but Sachin was missing in the stadium. Later, he revealed in his tweet on May 28 that he and his wife Anjali watched it with Lata didi at her residence. As MP, Didi did not take a single rupee as salary or a house in New Delhi. Similarly, Sachin too did not take a house in New Delhi and donated his entire MP Salary of 90 Lakhs to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund.
Not just Sachin, Didi has always, through her twitter handle encouraged match winning performances of Indian stars, such as VVS Laxman and current captain Virat Kohli. As recently as last month, in her tweet on Aug 2, 2018, she praised Virat for his brilliant test ton versus England in England. Earlier she had praised Rahul Dravid, blessed Yuvraj Singh when he was unwell with the dreaded disease and congratulated him on his return to the Indian team. As recently as 4 days back, in her tweet on 24th September she praised the batting of our Asia Cup openers Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma.
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That’s Lata Didi for you. Happy birthday to this wonderful personality.
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