HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LATA MANGESHKAR !

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LATA MANGESHKAR !

Today is Lata Mangeshkar's 92nd birth anniversary. For one who has brought so much joy to our lives, often been the source of solace, inspiration and the stimulus to our best artistic sensibilities, here's a happy birthday from all of us, 139 crore citizens of this country and so many more beyond it. May you find sustained health, happiness and peace in quiet repose with God in your years ahead! The whole world has but one Lata Mangeshkar. As Salil Choudhury had famously said, "A singer like her comes once in several centuries." So, to the one and only Lata Mangeshkar, our reverence, prostrations and open ears and souls so that the strains of 'Aayega aanewala', 'Uthhae ja unke sitam' and a thousand other melodies may keep pouring in and filling us with love divine and an earthly sense of the unearthly, the ethereal that she has encapsulated in her tiny terrestrial form. We love you, Lata Mangeshkar. Our lives would have been different but for you. You have filled us. That's all.

Written by Sugata Bose