Hasrat Jaipuri, Jaikishen, Raj Kapoor, Shankar & my father Shailendra. Bombay. Circa 1955 Image & Narrative contributed by Amla Shailendra Mazumdar, Dubai. U.A.E This is a photograph of an incredible team who marked the beginning of a golden era in Hindi Cinema’s music. Shailendra, (my father, whom we called Baba) Hasrat Jaipuri, Shankar and Jaikishen came together to create some of the most powerful and beautiful songs of the Hindi film industry, and it was none other than Raj Kapoor who discovered and brought this foursome together. My father, Shailendra (extreme right with a cigarette in his hands) came from a very humble background. As a young boy in Rawalpindi (now in Pakistan) he used to sing Bhajans (Religious Songs) in temples but after my grandfather lost all his money, they relocated to Mathura (Uttar Pradesh). It seemed that the times were always hard on his family. By 1948 he was an apprentice at a Railway workshop in Bombay and was struggling to make ends meet. Poetry, however was his savior & first love, and he wrote about social issues of the time and would often be invited to recite his poems at small cultural events. He came from Bihar,had lived in Rawalpindi, Mathura which made him skilled in various hindi & urdu dialects and their expressions. On one such evening at a Poetry Soiree organised by the Progressive Writers’ forum, my father’s recitation of his poem on Partition of India, titled “Jalta Hai Punjab” caught the attention of another attendee, actor and director Raj Kapoor. It was about the massacre of Hindus and Muslims alike during partition and how it left those who witnessed it scarred for life. Raj Kapoor, who introduced himself…