Years from now, when rny back is bent double with age, I shall tell my grandchildren that I once went to a concert by Lata Mangeshkar. What is more, I shall tell them with pride that I survived the ordeal.
Lata performed last autumn at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island, the usual East Coast venue for the popular, Bollywood-inspired extravaganzas that seem always to touch a special chord with ex-patriots from the Subcontinent in the US. The Coliseum is an indoor stadium where ice hockey matches are fought out, and can normally seat up to 18,000 beer-swilling, hot dog-munching Americans. On "Lata Nite", the place was packed to the rafters with desis Sardars, Sylhetis, Pathans, Gujaratis, Sinhalese, Malayalis, Kashmiris, the works —all eating samosas, vadas and dhoklas dunked in tart tamarind chutney.
This being an Indian event (and given our puritanical fetishes), there was absolutely no beer on sale, only Coca Cola, Sprite and a variety of other effervescent drinks. Those in search of any fizz that night would find it, alas, in those drinks alone, for the evening's star was as flat as a papad. And given that she is in her 70th year, her voice was just as brittle. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, Lata sounded awful, and only marginally better than the handful of jokers she had brought with her as her support act.
As you may have guessed, I am not a fan of Lata Mangeshkar. In fact, I have always disliked her singing. Her little girl's voice, the relentlessly high octaves, her excruciating humility and the unyielding plainness of her aspect—I have hated them all. I do not need to tell you, by the same token, that a legion of men would have lynched me in a trice had I expressed any of these views aloud in the queue for the restrooms, or the line for the popcorn. (The lyncher-in-chief would surely have been Kanu Chauhan, the real estate dealer from Queens, in New York, whose Rajsun Megastar Entertainment flew Lata to America. By my crudest calculations, the concert made about a million dollars at the box-office.)