Manna Dey: keep singing

The Dadasaheb Phalke award to Manna Dey might be most discussed in Kerala after his home state West Bengal. The man’s connection to the coastal state is a very old one.
In the land of the divine-voiced Yesudas, this man once saw himself in the idst of some of the most hotly contested debates the state has seen. As the millennium rung in and just about everyone worth his name was coming up with millennium polls for whatever they were worth, Kerala had one for the best film song ever.
Now Yesudas has sung so many songs, and so many of them hits that the grand title ‘Gaana Gandharvan’ – or Celestial Singer- sits very lightly and deservedly on him. Such is the enduring legend of the soft-spoken man that when Lata Mangeshkar and some of her close aides said that it is possible Lata may have sung the highest number of songs in India, Tamil song bard SP Balasubramaniam jumped into the debate.
Firstly he said that it is not Lata but yours truly who held that record. When that sounded immodest from SP- though the way he has got awards for singing, composing and acting, you’d forgive him for immodesty- the portly man said the only person who could have possibly sung more than him would be Yesudas.

Coming back to Manna Dey, in a very tightly contested poll with different actors taking sides, the outcome was a sensational one and spawned a hundred debates in a state which always believe the country has never acknowledged the massive artistic talent the tiny state held.

Back to the Manna Dey saga again. Voters in Kerala chose ‘maanasa mayele’ from the evergreen ‘Chemeen’ as the finest Malayalam film song ever. The singer- Manna Dey. To add to the surprise factor, the song was composed by a man who did not understand a word of Malayalam or had much of an expertise on Kerala except for an understanding of its communist fascination- Salil Chaudhary.

Later however Manna Dey lost out in a Hindi music era when fun and frolic in the voice of a singer was more in demand than meticulousness about the sound and note of the song. Kishore Kumar marched ahead. In the early 80s the same fate befell Suresh Wadkar who was pushed aside by untrained and in some cases jarring voices like Amit Kumar- after the Balika Vadhu and Love Story euphoria-, Shabbir Kumar and Mohammad Aziz.
But Manna Dey, forget all these awards. They cannot match up to the soft hue that comes over us when we hear the silken rendition of ‘zindagi kaisi hai paheli haye’ from Anand. Long live