At the age of 14, she received her first break in the movie Payal ki Jhankar in 1980 with the semi-classical song ‘Thirkat Ang’ composed by Chitalkar. She chose the latter.Īlka studied, although not as enthusiastically as she pursued music, for the next four years and received training under Kalyanji Anandji and Laxmikant Pyarelal. Her rendezvous with Raj Kapoor led her to Laxmikant (of the composer duo Laxmikant Pyarelal) who gave her two options-an immediate start as a dubbing artist or a later break as a singer. By the age of six, she was already singing in AIR Kolkata and by the age of 10, she had travelled to Mumbai with her mother to start her career as a child singer. But it has been almost two decades since she passed on the baton to Shreya Ghoshal and Sunidhi Chauhan and very few of the little that she sang after that have been popular.Īn ardent Lata Mangeshkar fan and a passionate music lover who started singing when barely four, Alka Yagnik found her first guru in her mother, Subha Yagnik, a trained classical singer. More than 20,000 songs in more than 1000 movies-that was Alka Yagnik’s discography by the beginning of the new millennium. But this generation of teenagers and those younger than them have probably never heard this voice unless their parents were Bollywood music enthusiasts who played 90s music at home.
It’s so soothing.”įor someone like me who grew up in the 80s and 90s, this pleasant voice was extremely familiar and instantly recognizable as Alka Yagnik.
I heard a young girl, probably a college goer, exclaim, “Oh I love this song!” Her friend asked, “Who’s the female singer?” The girl quipped, “Dunno. As I walked into a cafe near the university close to my home, a popular song from the movie Tamasha, ‘Agar Tum Saath Ho’, started playing on a TV channel.