CurrentAffairs : Lata Mangeshkar- old is gold but still old
What is the surest sign of a person turning old, mentally? When s/he starts criticizing everything about what's happening around him and wistfully pines for the "good old time" all the time. Nothing wrong in remembering what was great in the past, but if you find yourselves looking back instead of ahead, its a sure sign that life's coming to a dead end for you very soon.Lata Mangeshkar seems to have reached that dead end since some years now. She started by criticizing remixes. Now no one will claim that this is the greatest phenomenon to have hit the Indian Music scene, but then one can also argue that creation of all art forms is an evolutionary process and to create something lasting, you also need to go through such grime and dirt, as a collective creative experience and process. After all 99 % of everything new gets trashed and something emerges from that which is truly lasting. If the western world had trashed hard rock, blues, jazz, metal, because it did not confirm to the puritan view of musical taste as it existed then, would we be richer or poorer for it? I suspect poorer. I bet when Lata Mangeshkar sprung on the scene, all the classical music ustads too must have uttered a collective 'tut tut'.
Then she criticized films which are being remade like 'Don', Sholay'. Now its not as if she had a patent on these, so one wonders why the objection? After all, these films might be just pale copies of the original (Don) or they might, for all you know, make the original look pale (Ram Gopal Verma ke Sholay?). But whatever happens, as long as copyright laws are respected, why should anyone object? The argument that today's directors are just not creative enough to create their own new classics is just not good enough. There are plenty of films which came after these epics which were ground breaking, but that doesn't mean no one can EVER go back to yesterday's classics and try and do his own version of an epic. If that's stretched too far,gosh, even the Ramayana would be off limits!
Some time back, Lata also tried to stop the Pedder Road Flyover, since her appt. overlooks Pedder road. She threatened to leave Mumbai if the construction went ahead. The Maharashtra Govt. had bent down to this threat earlier, but this time, they ignored
One wishes the lady would just gracefully retire now instead of putting her foot in her mouth, repeatedly. After all, if she go a little deeper, she might end up damaging her precious vocal cords!
