Bengal and Tagore unite the Mangeshkars

The love for Bengal and the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore brought the Mangeshkars together in Kolkata.

The five siblings Lata, Asha, Usha, Hridaynath and Meena together for the first time performed outside their hometown Mumbai.
   
"We don't go like this anywhere. You see us like this in Mumbai and not anywhere else. It is our love for Bengal that has brought us here together," Asha Bhonsle said.
   
"We are like five fingers. We close like a fist when there is need," she added.
   
Composer-singer Hridaynath Mangeshkar, her younger brother, said that he persuaded his sisters to pay homage to Tagore in this metropolis.
   
"We have waited long to be together again. So, this time I asked them to come here. This is possible only in Kolkata and nowhere else," the 73-year-old, who made the late musician Salil Choudhury his guru, told reporters on Sunday.
   
'Tomar holo shuru amar holo shara..', a Tagore song sung by 81-year-old Lata Mangeshkar, the 'Nightingale of India',left the audience spellbound. She had once sung it with late composer-singer Hemanta Mukhopadhyay.
   
Her niece and Hridaynath's daughter Radha Mangeshkar joined singers Swagatalakshmi Dasgupta and Lopamudra Mitra in singing Tagore songs as Bengali film director Rituparno Ghosh recited at the programme named 'Panchkanya'.
   
"I will remain grateful to the organisers for giving me the opportunity to sing Rabindrasangeet in Kolkata," she said, confiding that she had been rehearsing for the last three months.
   
Asha, on popular demand, lent her voice to the popular Rabindrasangeet 'Bodo asha kore eshechi go'.
   
Their younger sister Usha was the only one that did not sing since as she was keeping ill.