Prodigy called Shreya

Can Shreya Ghoshal be called a prodigy ? At the age of 26, she has won four national awards and seven filmfare awards. By no means a small achievement. Her last national award was for songs in Bengali and Marathi. The other three were for Hindi.

Her voice is malleable and can suit different occasions, be it pathos, romance or classical. But to me she is at her best in romantic and sensuous songs. You’ve to just listen to `Jaadu hai nasha’ from Jism. When I first heard the song, I was hooked without knowing who the singer was. Later I found out it was Shreya who had won a national award for Devdas in the previous year. I’ve been a fan of this Bengali singer ever since.

She has sung in several other languages including all the South Indian languages. And mind you she has sung quite well in regional languages. She won a filmfare award for `Munpe vaa’ song in Tamil. In Malayalam what surprised me was her diction. Unlike the other North Indian singers be it the greats Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Kishore Kumar, Talat Mehmood or Udit Narayanan, Shreya did not sound like non-Malayali.

That is a rare quality and probably her strength. To sound like a Tamilian or Malayalee or Kannadiga when singing the songs in these languages is quite difficult for a North Indian singer. But several South Indian singers have sung beautiful songs in Hindi or other languages.

I think we’ll hear a lot more about Shreya in the coming years. After all she is just 26. By the time she hits 50, she could be having even ten national awards, definitely a record. Here is wishing the very best to her.