For the last couple of weeks, a fake news about playback singer Lata Mangeshkar hanging her boots has been doing the rounds on WhatsApp. “Lata Mangeshkar has turned 90 yrs old and she has decided to record her last song. She won't record anything hence forth,” states the sham WhatsApp forward with an air of authority.
The said last song comes with an appropriate tone of culmination and finality attached: “ Ata visavyacha kshan …”, ie. it's now time to take rest. Many of her fans and admirers have since been mourning the end of the golden era in music and, perhaps overwhelmed by emotions, forwarding the counterfeit news without seeking any clarity or confirmation.
However, some have thankfully also been pointing out the basic misinformation in the message — that she hasn’t yet turned 90; she will be 90 next year in September and that the song being shared is also not a recent recording.
According to a Facebook post by Jaipur-based music expert Pavan Jha, who claims to have received nine such forwards between November 27-29, the song was actually recorded in 2013 for a Marathi bhajan album titled Kshana Amrutache . And it isn’t as though Ms. Mangeshkar hasn’t sung anything after that.
“After this song Lata ji has recorded for a non-film album Raunak of A.R. Rahman and another album Ya Rabba composed by Baiju Mangeshkar. She has also recorded a song for music director Nikhil Kamat for a film titled Dunno Y2 in 2015,” points out Mr. Jha.
According to a report in The Hindustan Times, after keeping away from singing for two years due to ill health, she sang two shlokas from Ram Raksha Strotra under the supervision of composer Mayuresh Pai in January last year.
Ms. Mangeshkar is not the first victim from filmdom of the bogus news syndrome. Many random — and terrible on top of that — poems and verses keep getting wrongly attributed to Gulzar and religiously forwarded in his name. Hoax deaths have killed several film personalities on social media, including Amitabh Bachchan, Sonali Bendre, Farida Jalal and Ms Mangeshkar herself.
