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

The year was 1979. The hippies were drifting away. The universalism of the sixties and the seventies was wearing off with them. Democracies had stabilized and military dictators were bringing a semblance of uneasy calm to their territories. India was making a valiant attempt to come out of the gloom of the Emergency. The world seemed to be heading to a better place. Two events, though, would perhaps inextricably change the world for several decades to come. A popular movement by students, maulvis, and leftists led to the overthrow of the Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty of Iran, installing the US-backed Ayatollah Khomeini as its supreme leader.  Towards the end of the year, the Grand Mosque of Mecca, considered to be the holiest place for a billion Muslims, was besieged by armed militants with a goal to dislodge the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Their motive was to return to the "original ways of Islam" and repudiate everything perceived to be western - TV, sports, music, and mate...

  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...