Singer KK(Krishnakumar Kunnath) dies at 53, hours after concert in Kolkata

 Singer KK(Krishnakumar Kunnath), who gave Indian music lovers many hits over the last three decades has died at 53. He gave a performance at Nazrul Mancha on Tuesday and later went to his hotel where he fell ill. He was brought to a hospital where he was declared dead.

Minister Arup Biswas said about KK's death, “Singer Anupam Roy called me up and said he is hearing something bad from the hospital. Then I contacted the hospital. They said he was brought dead. Then I rushed to the hospital.”

KK released his first album, Pal in 1999. The singer-composer, whose real name was Krishnakumar Kunnath then focussed more on Bollywood than on his independent music, giving hits such as Tadap Tadap (Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, 1999), Dus Bahane (Dus, 2005), and Tune Maari Entriyaan (Gunday, 2014). 

He was born in Delhi and was also known for his electric live shows. His Instagram page had been sharing updates from his concert in Kolkata as recently as eight hours ago.

Lata Mangeshkar, India’s Nightingale(Swar Kokila), dies at 92

Legendary singer Lata Mangeshkar passed away in Mumbai on Sunday at the age of 92 due to multi-organ failure. The versatile singer, christened the Nightingale of India, had lent her voice to thousands of songs in 36 languages in a career spanning almost eight decades. Leading personalities from all walks of life paid rich tributes to Mangeshkar.

The singer was laid to rest on Sunday evening with full state honours at Mumbai’s Shivaji Park. Prime Minister Narendra Modi also visited Mumbai to pay his last respects to India’s ‘swar kokila’. As a mark of respect to the Bharat Ratna awardee, a two-day national mourning has been announced. The National Flag will fly at half-mast for two days and there will be no official entertainment.

Breach Candy hospital medical director said that Lata Mangeshkar passed away at 8:12 am on Sunday. “She came here as a Covid patient and age was against her. We tried our level best to save the legend. But she had complications,” he said. Mangeshkar had been diagnosed with Covid-19 and pneumonia. Speaking to Indian Express, Dr Samdhani said that they were very cautious since the beginning and she died because of multi-organ failure that was setting in last few days.

Born on September 28, 1929, in Madhya Pradesh, Lata Mangeshkar had music in her genes. Her father Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar was a Marathi musician and a theatre actor. During her lifetime, Mangeshkar worked with music greats from various generations as she delivered iconic numbers that remain relevant to this day. Known for her versatility, Mangeshkar dabbled in other film industries as well.

After Lata Mangeshkar moved to Mumbai, she was mentored by Master Vinayak, a filmmaker of the 1930s and Ghulam Haider. She went on to nurture a special relationship with composer Madan Mohan, with whom she delivered some of her most memorable songs. “I shared a special relationship with Madan Mohan, which was much more than what a singer and a music composer share. This was a relationship of a brother and a sister,” she said later, calling ‘Woh chup rahe’ from Jahan Ara as their favourite collaboration.

She had a similar relationship with Yash Chopra, and their collaboration yielded such hits as Dhool Ka Phool, Kabhi Kabhie, Silsila and Dil Toh Pagal Hai. She also worked with Chopra’s son, Aditya, on Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge. Perhaps, Dilip Kumar, whom she addresses as her older brother, said it best when he remarked, “None have been able to equal Lata’s refinement. It is very difficult for anyone to compete with her because she has invested so heavily in every person who cares for music – there’s such a lot of Lata Mangeshkar in everyone.”

Mangeshkar was conferred with three National Awards, and was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1989. In 2001, she was awarded the Bharat Ratna for her contribution to the arts, thereby becoming the second vocalist to receive this honour apart from late Carnatic music giant M S Subbulakshmi. She was also honoured with the Padma Vibhushan and Padma Bhushan.

Apart from lending her voice to several popular tracks, Lata Mangeshkar has also been credited as a music director. She composed music for Mohityanchi Manjula (1963), Maratha Tituka Melvava (1964), Sadhi Manase (1965) and Tambadi Mati (1969).

Mangeshkar has also produced a handful of films such as Vaadal, Jhaanjhar, Kanchan Ganga and Lekin.

Lata Mangeshkar is survived by her four younger siblings — Asha Bhosle, Usha Mangeshkar, Meena Khadikar and Hridaynath Mangeshkar.

Book Review: The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo By Taylor Jenkins Reid

 An aging starlet with seven marriages behind her generously offers the rights to her memoir to an inexperienced writer—at a heartbreaking cost.

Monique Grant is stunned when Hollywood legend Evelyn Hugo grants an exclusive interview to her over more seasoned journalists, but when she’s also chosen to publish Evelyn’s final confessions after her death, she learns that the 79-year-old actress has enough life experience for them both. Growing up poor in Hell’s Kitchen, young Evelyn Herrera trades her virginity for a ride to Hollywood, changes her name, and climbs the rungs of the entertainment-industry ladder one husband at a time until she hits Oscar gold. To write her off as being calculating and fickle would leave out the difficulty of being a woman, especially a woman of color, trying to get by in the late 1950s without a man’s blessing. 

Evelyn plays up her bombshell figure and hides her Cuban roots by dying her hair blonde—the first of many lies she’ll have to tell over the course of her life to prove to the world that she deserves her place in the spotlight. She’s unapologetically ambitious but not without remorse. Which of her seven husbands was her true love? Why did she choose Monique to tell her story? Evelyn recounts her failures and triumphs in chronological order, one husband at a time, with a few breaks for Monique to report back to her editor. 

The celebrity tell-all style is a departure from Reid’s (One True Loves, 2016, etc.) previous books, but Evelyn Hugo is a character who can demand top billing. When asked if it bothers her that “all anyone talks about when they talk about you are the seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo,” she says no: “Because they are just husbands. I am Evelyn Hugo.”

Reid's heroine reveals her darkest secrets as if she were wiping off makeup at the end of the night—a celebration of human frailty that speaks to the Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor in us all.

Source: Kirkus Reviews

In ‘The Midnight Library,’ Books Offer Transport to Different Lives

 Book Review: The Midnight Library

Few fantasies are more enduring than the idea that there might be a second chance at a life already lived, some sort of magical reset in which mistakes can be erased, regrets addressed, choices altered. This deep desire for a different life, or for more lives than just the one, is at the heart of any number of stories — movies like “Groundhog Day,” “Sliding Doors” and “It’s a Wonderful Life”; television shows like “Sliders” and “Quantum Leap”; wonderful novels like Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life,” Andrew Sean Greer’s “The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells,” Jo Walton’s “My Real Children” and many others. Into this ever-popular genre, Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library” is a welcome addition.

Haig’s central character is 35-year-old Nora Seed. Nora is a woman with many gifts and few accomplishments. She’s estranged from her only living relative, an older brother, and also distant from her only close friend both emotionally and geographically. She had “always had the sense that she came from a long line of regrets and crushed hopes that seemed to echo in every generation.” In short order, in a life already littered with remorse, she loses both her job and her beloved cat, Voltaire. “As she stared at Voltaire’s still and peaceful expression — that total absence of pain — there was an inescapable feeling brewing in the darkness. Envy.”

In Haig’s book, the mechanism through which transmigration takes place is the Midnight Library of the title. This structure occupies a magical space between life and death. Its facade replicates an ordinary library, shelves with books, but on an infinite scale.

The librarian is very wise, as librarians tend to be. She explains to Nora that every book on the shelves is a doorway into a different life. Only one book is an exception to this, “The Book of Regrets,” a volume so heavy and toxic it’s dangerous for Nora to read more than a few lines.

By the time Nora arrives at the Midnight Library, the reader has already learned what her chief regrets are. Each of these now functions in the plot as a kind of promissory note; we expect to experience the lives in which these particular regrets are addressed and, in this, we are not disappointed. But the repercussions of eliminating each regret often surprise Nora. Choices are not the same as outcomes, the librarian warns her.

The librarian encourages Nora to sample a variety of texts, promising that as soon as Nora feels dissatisfied with a new life, she’ll find herself back in the library, ready to have another go. This may happen after only a few moments or months might pass. All this while, time in the library is at a standstill. An infinite number of other lives beckon.

Nora is initially reluctant — life is just what she didn’t want more of — but the librarian is firm. Why else would you be here? she asks. So Nora opens her first book.

By the end, she’ll have opened a great many more. Haig describes some of Nora’s provisional lives in detail. Others last only as long as a sentence: “In one life she only ate toast.” Suspense comes from the fact that Nora is dropped in midstream, with no preparation. She always remembers her original life — her root life — so she always has that point of comparison. But she knows nothing of the life she’s just entered. Often she must look for herself online, read her social media accounts, in order to know who she is. More than once she finds herself performing before large crowds, speaking on a subject in which she has no background or expected to sing a song some other Nora recorded, but this one has never heard before. More than once, she’s in a sexual relationship with a man she doesn’t know or mother to children she’s never met.

A small cast of characters reappears in many of Nora’s lives. Her brother, her parents, her best friend are almost always present. She sometimes crosses paths with a man she came close to marrying. As she plays through her own myriad possibilities, the impact of her choices on each of these characters is also profound; their lives are as altered by Nora’s decisions as her own. Even peripheral characters from her root life are transformed.

As in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” Nora appears to be the X factor in all these changes. The supporting cast is also making different choices, but these are largely posited as responses to Nora’s own altered actions. Only Nora’s choices feel determinative.

The issue of the many Noras temporarily displaced from their own root lives is somewhat troubling. Where do they go in the interim? If/when Nora finds the life in which she will stay, what will become of the Nora whose life that actually is? Answers are hinted at, but the issue is not directly addressed. The conundrum at the heart of the book is the implication that our Nora is the real Nora and the other lives all variations on that first life, the root life, rather than equally valuable universes filled with equally valuable people. In the infinity of the multiverse, surely there are other Noras also trying on our Nora’s life from time to time, displacing her as they do so. The universe is full of infinite possibility, but the story here remains tightly focused on the internal life of a single woman and all her might-have-beens.

It can be hard to keep a reader’s energy invested in a depressed and somewhat listless character, but Nora is smart and observant; she remains good company. She’s studied philosophy and has a particular affection for the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The book is all the richer, as any book would be, for the inclusion of several of his quotes: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams” and “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

There is likewise a danger that such a recursive plotline will tire the reader. But here, too, the book succeeds. At just the right moment, not too soon and not too late, Nora makes her final decisive move, taking us into the last section of the book. The ending is satisfying but not surprising. By the time it comes, in fact, only one choice still seems possible.

The narrative throughout has a slightly old-fashioned feel, like a bedtime story. It’s an absorbing but comfortable read, imaginative in the details if familiar in its outline. The invention of the library as the machinery through which different lives can be accessed is sure to please readers and has the advantage of being both magical and factual. Every library is a liminal space; the Midnight Library is different in scale, but not kind. And a vision of limitless possibility, of new roads taken, of new lives lived, of a whole different world available to us somehow, somewhere, might be exactly what’s wanted in these troubled and troubling times.

Source: New York Times