Google celebrates Mohammed Rafi’s 93rd birthday

It is legendary singer Mohammed Rafi’s 93rd birthday, and what could be a better tribute from Google than a doodle? Sunday’s doodle created by Mumbai-based illustrator Sajid Shaikh shows the Badshah of playback singing crooning a number in a studio, while actors give life to it on the silver screen.

Born on this day in 1924, Mohammed Rafi developed a taste for singing inspired by a fakir in his village in today’s Punjab. “In the early 1930’s, a little boy named Pheeko (Rafi’s nickname) would wait for a travelling fakir to stop by his home village of Kotla Sultan Singh and follow him on his rounds, imitating his chants as they went along,” reads Google’s blog post.

Rafi and his family moved to undivided India’s Lahore. He began his formal training in classical music here from Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, Pandit Jiwan Lal Mattoo and Firoze Nizami. Rafi’s first public performance was at the age of 13. He was just 17 when he first tried his luck in playback singing. It was a duet with Zeenat Begum for a Punjabi movie Gul Baloch.

At the age of 20, Rafi moved to Bombay, the mecca of Hindi cinema. Shyam Sundar, the music director of Gul Baloch, gave Rafi his first chance to croon in a Hindi movie — Gaon Ki Gori.

From then on Rafi went on to sing over 5,000 songs, including about 310 songs in other Indian languages such as Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Odia, Punjabi, and Telugu, in a span of over three decades. He also sang non-film songs such as qawwalis, ghazals, and bhajans.

During his entire career, he worked with many great music directors like O.P. Nayyar, Laxmikant Pyarelal and R.D. Burman, Rafi and delivered some of evergreen hits including Yeh duniya yeh mehfil, Chura liya hai tumne, Tum jo mil gaye ho and many more.

His song Kya Hua Tera Wada in Hum Kisise Kum Naheen (1977) won him a National Award for playback singing.

Rafi died in Mumbai on July 31, 1980 following a massive heart attack. It is said that Rafi recorded a song for music director duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal hours before his death.