There are some singers, who you may not have wanted to listen to yourself, but were forced to because your parents loved them or you just happened to be born in the RD Burman-Kishore Kumar era. The whole childhood of a lot of millennials has been spent listening to their fathers singing along ‘Yeh dil na hota bechara’ or their mothers crooning to ‘Yeh sham mastani’. Till date, you switch on an FM channel or a retro show and there you’ll see; Kishore Kumar’s magic is still alive!
Without any professional training in music, he still earned the tag of the most romantic singer of his era. The sheer energy that echoed with his words was something that resonated with the people back then and continues to live till today. Not just Hindi, his voice worked well for even other regional languages including Bengali, Marathi, Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada and Odia. Dance, jump, roll and yodel in just one song: nobody since then, has even come close to what he creates on screen. He was never considered in the same league as Mohammad Rafi, or Mukesh; but still was a king in his own might.
Apart from him being a celebrated singer, he’s also one of the best comic actors India has ever produced. Not just this, he has donned the hat of a director, lyricist, and composer and even of a screenwriter at times.
He could easily be referred to, as the perfect combination of quirk and genius. A slave to his eccentricities, he not just made madness fashionable but also garnered a lot of fandom for his whim. From asking distributors to avoid his films to finding friends in trees, to running away from sets in between shoots and returning on his own will; there are countless stories which prove he was definitely one of his own kind.
One such story was narrated to us by Iqbal actor Shreyas Talpade during an interview. The actor described an event where Kishore Kumar, while shooting for an incident, left the shoot in between and headed to Lonavala because he didn’t hear the director saying ‘cut’. He said, “I’ve always been fascinated by Kishore Da. He was a totally mad guy. He was a strange combination of madness and genius and the kind that not everybody understood. Once, he was shooting a drive-scene for a film and in between the shoot he raced his car to Lonavala. When asked by the filmmakers as to why he left like this he simply said, “Maine cut nahi suna toh mai chala gaya".
The legend of the multi-talented artiste extraordinaire Kishore Kumar has been passed on from generation to generation and lives on till today. On his 29th death anniversary, here's a playlist of the maverick musician-actor for you to rejoice. So, savour, bookmark and, listen and celebrate the genius called Kishore Kumar.
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