‘Swaratarang’ artistes, Samant take audience down memory lane

Nagpur: Swaratarang Music Academy celebrated the tenth foundation day in style by taking a jam-packed Suresh Bhat Sabhagruh on a nostalgia-filled journey of popular Hindi and Marathi songs on Tuesday.
Students of the academy gave splendid performances while noted singers Vaishali Samant and Niranjan Bobde presented selected songs in their mellifluous voice before an enthusiastic crowd which lustily cheered them.

The event started with a Marathi song ‘Mi Radhika mi premika’, sung by Bhagyashree Watkar. This was followed by Aishwarya Nagrajan’s ‘Aao huzur tumko’, originally sung by Asha Bhosle from ‘Kismat’.

‘Ek chatur naar’ from ‘Padosan’, presented by Arjun Kulkarni and Naman Gharpure, had the audience glued to their seats, making them remember the irresistible Kishore Kumar and Mehmood engaged in a dual in the film.

‘Agobai, dhagobai’, a popular Marathi children’s song, was presented by a group of children in the age group of six to eight years which too drew repeated rounds of applause, highlighting the fact that it continues to be popular with people.

Isbabul Hasan, businessman and student of Bobde, performed a medley of songs from Amitabh Bachchan’s movies like ‘Rang barse bhigi chunariya..’ and ‘Mach gaya shor’ that had a stamp of the megastar.

Hasan said, “It has been for the last three years that I have been performing alongside Bobde. “I am a big fan of retro Bollywood music from the age of six. Mohammad Rafi was the singer I started admiring from a very young age and he is my biggest inspiration.”

The music academy was established in 2008 with a batch of 25 students which has now earned a name and fame, and grown in size. It now has around 400 students in which Raghunath and Niranjan Bobde are head teachers. Niranjan especially trains those who are to perform on stage.

The accompanying artistes were Mahendra Dhole and Parimal Joshi (keyboard), Pankaj Yadav (dholak) and Subhash Wankede (percussion).

(Reporting by Tejas Mundhada)