SPB The God of Playback Singing...In Ten Episodes

The year was 1992. The First Gulf War had ended and the world was cooling off after a thirty-five nation coalition, led by the United States, handed out a decisive defeat to Iraq and its supreme leader, Saddam Hussein. The situation in Bosnia was rapidly deteriorating due to an ethnic conflict between the Serbs and Bosnians. A hundred thousand people, predominantly Bosnian Muslims, would be massacred by the end of the conflict. India had just managed to avert a balance-of-payments near-miss that had brought the country to its knees and to the brink of bankruptcy. The government had to air-dash sixty-seven tons of bullion to European banks to secure a $600 million loan so that we could pay our monthly bills.  It was a historic low-point for the country.   The situation forced the then Prime Minister, PV Narasimha Rao, to announce sweeping economic reforms that would open up India's economy and eventually pull three-hundred million people out of poverty. Just when things were lo...

  1966 was a turbulent year. The Vietnam War was raging unabated. American President Lyndon Johnson was struggling to disentangle himself and his country from the mess. Mao Zedong had launched the Cultural Revolution with a vow to preserve Chinese Communism. The self-declared republic of Rhodesia was heading for a showdown with other African nations. The year started tragically for India as Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri passed away in Tashkent, in erstwhile Soviet Union, while negotiating a peace pact with Pakistani President, Ayub Khan. In the field of music and entertainment, this was the era of Shankar-Jaikishan, MS Viswanathan, Ghantasala, Devarajan Master, Mohammad Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, TM Sounderarajan, and P Susheela. The Bombay triumvirate, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, and Raj Kapoor and their southern counterparts -  MGR, NTR, Rajkumar, and Prem Nazir - were firmly entrenched as the leading stars in their respective industries.  Internationally, The Beatles clai...

Let us start from where it all began. SP Balasubrahmanyam was born in Konetampet (present-day Tiruvallur district, Tamilnadu), a year before India’s independence, in an orthodox, Telugu brahmin family that hailed from Nellore in Andhra Pradesh. His father, SP Sambamurthy, was a Harikatha exponent and his mother, Sakunthalamma, looked after the bounteous family of three brothers and five sisters, that included SP Shailaja, who would go on to become a popular playback singer later in life. A TWIST OF FATE Growing up, in the early 60s, SPB had a typical Indian, sub-urban dream: to become an engineer, qualify to be a khaki-clad gazetted officer in his native Nellore, and ride around in an official Jeep eliciting salutes from his subordinates and the public. He was definitely artistically endowed. He sang and won prizes in music competitions, acted in school plays, and even formed a music band of his own, but had never taken his talents seriously. He enrolled into Jawaharlal Nehru Technical...