"Kishore Kumar - The Unofficial Biography" by Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Parthiv Dhar

I recently finished reading "Kishore Kumar: The Unofficial Biography" by Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Parthiv Dhar (Harper Collins India, 2022).

Growing up in a somewhat culturally sophisticated environment, listening to popular film songs was not exactly considered a very cool thing to do. But urban India in the 70s and 80s did not have a thriving pop/rock music culture and film-songs were the closest substitute. These songs would often blare from loudspeakers at random occassions from festivals to local football matches.

There was a voice that got inside my head in my early teens but I could not put a name on it yet. It would yodel and squeal with joy at a manic pitch that is hard to imagine from someone who is not high (I would later know that the singer was a teetotaller) and then would sing songs of hearbreak and loss in a soulful voice that dripped with emotion and sensitivity. I was smitten.

I had an eclectic taste in music and was also listening to classical and semi-classical music, British and American popular music ranging from folk to rock (jazz would come later) but this person had a unique voice and gave depth and poignancy to the cheesiest of lyrics (e.g., "My eyes are flooded as if it is the Monsoon season/ Yet my heart is thirsty" and "You have come, the light has come/ Otherwise the flame was fading from the lamp/ In you I have found a reason to live" to take two examples of songs I love).

I got to know that the voice belonged to Kishore Kumar. I started buying his LP records and cassettes, which my liberal parents were thankfully fine with. Interestingly, both of them took to his songs, as did my younger brother. To this date, I have most of his songs, both Hindi and Bengali, on CDs and digital format.

Reading this meticulously researched book and getting to know a lot about Kishore Kumar's acting career in flims, I was left wondering with the following thought: was it the actor in him that allowed him to shift emotional gears so effortlessly in songs ranging from the light fast-paced comic-absurd to the slow, soulful, and poignant ones? Do actors who sing have an advantage in this regard? Who would be comparable - Sinatra?