Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal was to fly down from Kolkata to Mumbai to personally confer her state's highest civilian honour, the Banga Bibhushan on her phone buddy, Lata Mangeshkar. However, Lata postponed the meeting, citing ill-health.
The songstress tells us, "An illness left me weak. My doctors advised me not to strain myself. So I requested Mamataji to push the date forward from October 20 to November. That's all."
It's a little known fact that Bengal's Didi and Lata Didi are friends. In fact, one hears from sources, that the two women "not only exchange gossip, but also gifts".
Lata laughs, "One doesn't speak about gifts. Their value is lessened by talking about them. But yes, we are on the phone with one another. She is warm, generous and affectionate. She is generous enough to say my songs are so popular in West Bengal that I'm a Bangla artiste. That's an honour, coming from her."
In fact, that's the reason she intimated the Bengal CM of her change of plans directly. "I didn't want her to get to know of my wish to postpone the meeting for the Banga Bibhushan from a third party. So I called her directly. She was very concerned and accommodating. She told me we can do the token function any time I'm up to it. We'll do it in November."
Her Bengali connection
Lata gets nostalgic about her links with Bengal. "I sang some of my best songs in Bengali for Salilda (Choudhary) and Hemantda (Kumar). Later, these songs were also done in Hindi and became equally popular. I was very close to both composers. And of course, my favourite co-singer was Kishore Kumar. He was so entertaining that I'd be in splits during the recordings of even the most sombre-mooded duets. As soon as the composer would call for the final take, Kishoreda would get suddenly serious before the microphone while I'd be still giggling."
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