Equal Music

8216;8216;Let8217;s do it fast. I8217;m already late for college,8217;8217; says Shreya Ghoshal earnestly. College? Yes, Bollywood14...

8216;8216;Let8217;s do it fast. I8217;m already late for college,8217;8217; says Shreya Ghoshal earnestly. College? Yes, Bollywood8217;s fastest rising playback singer is just 18 and has no compunctions about confessing to dividing her time between singing for Hindi films and studying for her BA degree in English literature.

After a dream debut in Sanjay Leela Bhansali8217;s Devdas, Ghoshal8217;s raunchy numbers in Pooja Bhatt Productions8217; Jism are now chart-toppers. And Bollywood is already making a beeline for this collegian8217;s doorstep. 8216;8216;I wanted to be a doctor or an engineer. But then I got interested in music and here I am,8217;8217; she says with girlish enthusiasm. You can8217;t quite blame her for her bookish ambitions 8212; after all, almost every child in the sprawling campus of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre BARC, where her father is a scientist, grows up dreaming of a 8216;8216;practical, secure, professional career8217;8217;.

But then, as has been well-recorded no pun intended, Bhansali heard her sign in the finals of Sa Re Ga Ma, a television music contest, and signed her on for his blockbuster. Didn8217;t her academically inclined parents oppose her foray into big bad Bollywood? 8216;8216;On the contrary, they encouraged me a lot. My mother is a singer herself while daddy loves music. When they saw me interested in music, they gave me all the freedom I needed. The atmosphere at home was quite conducive to learning the art,8217;8217; she explains.

Devdas tested the years of learning 8212; Ghoshal trained under the late music director Kalyanji for some time before moving onto classical singer Mukta Bhide 8212; with the then 17-year-old rendering the lilting Silsila yeh chahat ka, and the classical-based Bairi Piya8230; with aplomb. Ask her about the songs in the Bipasha Basu-John Abraham 8216;8216;erotic thriller8217;8217; Jism, and she retorts: 8216;8216;It8217;s wrongly called erotic. We have had films like Arth and Aastha before. People are reading too much into the film8217;s title. It deals with a very contemporary issue. I loved singing all its songs.8217;8217;

With her tracks featuring in forthcoming films like Farah Khan8217;s Main Hoon Na and Mukesh Bhatt8217;s Saaya, Ghoshal is certain this is just the beginning of the road for her. And to make sure she strikes no false notes, she8217;s making it a point to work with all sorts of music directors, from Ismail Durbar to Annu Malik to Sanjeev Dharshan. 8216;8216;I don8217;t want to be typecast. The industry puts labels on you easily. But I want to be versatile,8217;8217; Ghoshal declares. 8216;8216;I am exploring different posibilities like pop, classical-based or just light, romatic songs.8217;8217;

To her, riyaaz is a 8216;8216;saadhna never to be missed8217;8217;, while reading 8212; everything from Wordsworth to Jane Austen and D H Lawrence, as befits a student of literature 8212; is a hobby. And though the bright lights of Bollywood beckon most temptingly, Ghoshal is keen on doing her post-graduation should recording schedules permit. Clearly, harmony is something that comes easy to her.