Manna Dey On Kishore, Walk the Talk with Shekhar Gupta Options

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In case anyone missed Walk the Talk's Shekhar Gupta interviewing Manna Dey, here's what one of India's living legends spoke about Kishore in glowing terms.
The transcript below features a part of the full interview where he speaks about his relationship with Kishore & RD. Hope you enjoy it:


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Gupta: So why did you think that you did not quite get your due? People always talk of three greats (Kishore, Rafi & Mukesh); it must be four greats.

MD: No, I don’t mind not being called a great singer because I don’t think I’m a great singer. I have been a student of good music, I can sing good songs. As for the rest, I rate Mohammad Rafi as one of the very best of all time. He was undoubtedly one of the very best. He was self-taught and he made a style of his own, and I would rate him the icon in playback singing.


Gupta: What about Mukesh and Kishore Kumar, your other contemporaries?

MD: Kishore was a natural singer. He never learnt music, but he had the natural talent and what a voice he had.

Gupta: He had a natural talent for everything. Acting, direction, writing, women...

MD: Everything, no doubt about it. I’m a very big Kishore fan. I have always rated him as one of the great entertainers in the field of music.

Gupta: I think one of your songs that the present generation remembers most of all is the one you sang with him, Ek chatur naar karke shringaar. Between Mehmood and Kishore and Sunil Dutt, you had a fantastic cast of characters.

MD: You know we started that song in the morning at 9 o’ clock and finished in the evening at 9 o’ clock. Twelve hours of recording...

Gupta: And it looked as if it was a live jugalbandi.

MD: With Kishore, many times we have sung together, in Sholay we sang Ye dosti, it was like a picnic. Pancham (R D Burman) was such a lively fellow. We three used to make a hell of a lot of noise on the sets.

Gupta: In Bengali or in Hindi?

MD: In Hindi, of course. We used to make a hell of a lot of noise, and in that kind of noise, good things used to be born, jaise ki ‘Ek chatur naar’ mein ‘Naach na jaane aangan tedha’. Udhar Kishore singing ‘Oh tedhe, oh tedhe’...It was all impromptu and it was not there in the beginning. His brain used to wander about all the time.