For the lover’s of Hindi film music, the beginning of year couldn’t have been anything better. Lata Mangeshkar has brought a special edition of calender, featuring 24 music composers. The maestros with whom she has worked in a career spanning 60 years. Yeah that true, 24 legendary music directors – two composers for each month.

See the idea was given to me by my brother, Pt. Hridaynath Mangeshkar,” Lataji begins. “Infact, last year we had brought out another calender featuring all the Mangeshkars. The members of Mangeshkar family – the sibling – me along-with Asha, Meena, Usha and Pt. Hridaynath. And last but not least my niece, Radha,” opens up Lataji.

Last year the calender had all the rare pictures and photographs of the Mangeshkar clan. “So, this time Hridaynath suggested the idea of my pictures clicked during the various recordings, with all the great musicians. People who have contributed to my career as a play-back singer.”

Or should we say Lataji contributing to the `repertoire’ those music directors ?.

“Believe me, those were the days when no photographers used to visit the recording studios.
Today atleast, the younger generation has mobiles, they can click photographs at a snap. In our times, we never thought of clicking and keeping the pictures and photographs for posterity,” she adds – with an emphasis on that the photographs used for the calenders are very rare and the result of a lot of brainstorming.

Yet there were some of the personalities she missed having herself in the same frame.
“I didn’t had the photos of Khemchand Prakash, ( who gave us some of the wonderful compositions like `Ayega aanewala ‘ from Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal).

“Even finding a photograph of Shyam Sunder was very difficult,” she gets nostalgic.

“So many of photos were from our collection.” Yet, they had to source some of the photos from collectors.

Beginning with Ghulam Hyder – the music director who gave her a first song in the year 1948 – in `Padmini’ to A R Rehman – the youngest of the lot of 24 music directors – Lataji recollects special touch of each and every musician – or how a particular song was recorded.

So, Lataji has taken efforts to select her favourite song from each of these set of music composers, specially to print on the calender.

Lataji speaks fondly about the time they had spent in recording the songs.

She also remembers the day when Ghulam Hyder had predicted her future – “that one day the whole world will follow you,” he had said to have predicted.

One has to sit with apt attention to listen to Lata Didi’s recounting of those golden days of golden music, her songs, her composers and many anecdotes.

But coming back to this calender, any connoisseur of Hindi music lover – will love to have this memorabilia – as a collector’s edition. Pure Gold !!

As a parting shot we ask Lata Didi – what about the next edition of calenders – `Oh it is also there. But then you will have to wait for till December 2011.”