Shreya Ghoshal mesmerizes Atlanta audience

Shreya Ghoshal mesmerizes Atlanta audience
Story & photos by Girish Modi

Contrary to popular belief that genius singers like Lata Mangeshkar is born once in a millennium, a replication of her was seen by music lovers when Bollywood’s contemporary singing sensation Shreya Ghoshal held captive a packed audience of music lovers with her performance at the Sydney Marcus Auditorium in downtown Atlanta on the night of 3rd July.

Shreya has been on a 3-month tour of the USA and this was her 16th and concluding performance in Atlanta. It was the most glamorous and extravaganza concert done to perfection with Bollywood’s glitzy dance numbers.

The concert, organized by Rahim Paracha, Kew Ray and SB Rath under the banner of Paracha Entertainment, lasted well over 3 hours

The music feast was preceded by a typical Bollywood dance by her dance troupe and a violin solo by Ashit Pandit. After the audience got into an expectant mood, Shreya came on stage to a thunderous ovation. Apart from regaling the audience with her popular numbers from films Delhi 6, 3Idiots, Guru, Devdas and Om Shanti Om, Shreya managed to lure the audience into participating.
The listeners were terribly excited and many of them spontaneously started dancing in the aisles and near the stage. Shreya sang a couple of duets along with Harpeet Deol.

To lend her show a sense of fulfillment, Shreya sang a few hits of Lata Mangeshkar - Tere Bin Zindagi se (Film Aandhi), Ye Zindagi Usi ki hai (Film Anarkali) and Lag ja gale se (Film Wo Koun Thi). The rendition was so amazingly deceptive that many mistook that it was Lata Mangeshkar singing.

Shreya convinced the audience that one more Lata Mangeshkar has arrived.

It is believed that Shreya is a child prodigy and like Lataji, she too started singing at the tender age of 4 accompanying her mother on the harmonium. As a child artiste, she won the children's special episode of the Sa Re Ga Ma on Zee TV. Late music composer Kalyanji, who was a judge at the competition, convinced her parents to move to Mumbai.

After relocating to Mumbai, Shreya trained under him for 18 months and continued her classical music training with Mukta Bhinde in Mumbai.
As a teenager Shreya continued to compete against many talented teenaged singers and attained popularity by singing mostly Lataji’s songs. Shreya found that Lataji’s songs were object lessons for the advancement of an upcoming singer. It is noteworthy that another playback singer of 90’s, Anuradha Paudwal, also has admitted that she progressed in her singing career by rehearsing Lataji’s songs.

Many film producers and music directors had their eyes set on Shreya while listening to her sing on Sa Re Ga Ma. As soon as she won the first prize in 2001, she was signed in films for playback singing. Not surprisingly, she won the coveted Filmfare award and R. D. Burman award for the maiden song she sang for the film Devdas. Since then, Shreya never looked back and continued to offer numerous hit songs in over 140 films.

Predictably, Shreya won 4 Filmfare awards in 4 consecutive years – not to speak of the countless other musical awards including 4 National awards, all in less than 10 years of her professional career. This is indeed a unique feat unmatched by any other singer. Besides Hindi, she has also sung songs with equal felicity in Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

Since both Lataji and Ashaji have reached their sunset years and Aalka Yagnik and Kavita Krishnamurthy have not come to the forefront, Shreya has quickly filled the void. Shreya owes a large part of her success to new music directors like the legendary A. R. Rahman, Shankar-Ehsaan-Roy trio, Vishal-Vinay duo and Anu Malik. They have created new genre of music by fusing western hip-hop and rock with Indian classical music and Shreya is tailor-made to sing these songs. Like Lataji, Shreya’s voice synchronizes admirably with many heroines’ voices and this has proved one more blessing for her.

The grand finale item of the evening was her most popular number Dola re (Film Devdas) for which she had won her first Filmfare award. Shreya was accompanied by four female dancers in elegantly-clad costumes and the choreography too was excellent.

It is no wonder that the gifted Shreya Ghoshal has reached the pinnacle of her playback singing career within a short span of time and the indications are she will continue to dominate film music in the years to come.

July-10-2010