Remembering the musical genius called Kishore Kumar

rGoogle's brilliant doodle on August 4 honouring Kishore Kumar's 85th birth anniversary imaginatively tried capturing all that defines the legendary artist. The rectangular frame around the portrait highlighted a vintage movie camera, pen and paper, a music note and a couple of theatre masks, to underline his consummate versatility as filmmaker, lyricist, singer-composer and actor.

It is impossible to judge the genius of Kishoreda from a list of a dozen songs.

Kishore Kumar was all this and more. He was a musical revolution, one that changed almost everything about how Bollywood would sing, compose and imagine its songs after him. No single male voice has perhaps spawned as many clones as Kishore Kumar did. There was more to him beyond the workspace, too.

He was the quintessential eccentric musical genius, and everything about him always made news - whether it is his four marriages, his waking up in the middle of the night to talk to his plants, or his arriving on the set of a film once with half his face shaved because the producer insisted on paying him only half his fee.

He bluntly turned down Indira Gandhi's proposal to sing paeans for Emergency (which resulted in a ban on his songs on All India Radio, though that hardly affected his popularity). In an era when showbiz was yet to be governed by PR tricks, Kishore Kumar was a limelight magnet who never had to try hard. It is impossible to judge the genius of Kishoreda from a list of a dozen songs. Still, we give it a shot.