A treat for many

 My Dadi was Mahlaqa Begum

Who had a younger brother, Manzoor Mahmood

Some of you may know him through his son

The Payback Singer, Talat Mahmood,

aka The King of Ghazals.

(I called him Chacha Jania)

In 1937 when Jinnah Sahab went to Lucknow for a conference, as soon as the Welcome address was over the Administrators asked Manzoor Sahab (Dada Abbu to me) to recite Iqbal ka Tarana in his wonderful voice.

The recording was done on a Wire-Recorder and it was given, much later, to Chacha Jania in Bombay. He had EMI transfer it into a Double-78RPM record. Both were full of hisses, noise, crackles, and more. But that's the way it was, anyway.

When CJ came to Karachi 1961 he brought the 78RPM recording and asked Rashid Latif Ansari of EMI to record it for his brothers, including my father. Rashid Bhai was a great fan of CJ and occasionally sang his songs, too. He made the best he could of the recording with whatever noise reduction software they had and we were all give this version.

CJ's grand niece, Sahar Zaman, has done a beautiful job in Talat Mahmood - A Definitive Biography and her interviews about it can be seen on numerous TV shows in Delhi. She is a Newscaster and an Artist, too. Her book has a chapter that deals with CJ's young life with her Phupi (Mahlaqa) and her teaching him how to sing ghazals.

Last week she asked if anyone had digitized the 78RPM. No one had. So I decided to Digitize it and sent it to Sahar. Between her new software and my own here we managed to produce a better version of the Tarana - though it still has enough noise etc, on it.

The Audio will be sent out to family and friends

(and to anyone else interested and asks for it).