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Song: ‘Yahan badla wafaa ka bewafaai ke siwa…’ MOHAMMED RAFI’s FIRST DUET IN HINDI FILMS : Years later in 1947, it was this same Firoze Nizami who gave Mohammed Rafi his first duet in Hindi films with singer Noorjehan. Soon Rafi’s voice was heard over the radio and the people back in his village were very thrilled to hear the voice of this talented boy from their village. Impressed with young Rafi’s voice he invited him to sing for the Lahore Radio Station. As luck would have it one day one of his customers happened to be music director Firoze Nizami who also worked at the All India Radio, Lahore. He had the habit of humming a tune or a song while working. His job was to cut the nails of the customers. When Rafi was around 15 years of age, his family shifted to Lahore where he started working in his father’s salon. Mohammed Rafi was born on 24th December 1924 in Kotla Sultan Singh, a village near Amritsar in Punjab, India. It was almost as if Rafi Saab had a divine hand guiding him right from the beginning slowly but surely to reach the path for which he was born. When we look back at Rafi’s early days it is interesting to note that he never really struggled too much to make it as a singer. The fakir was so impressed by the little boy that he predicted that one day he would become a great singer. Enchanted by the fakir’s song little Rafi would follow him everywhere and was able to reproduce it to perfection.
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As a little boy he was drawn to the songs sung by a wandering ‘fakir’ (minstrel) in his village. Right from childhood he had the rare gift of picking up any song he heard and singing it exactly like the original much to the surprise of the people around him. On the occasion of his 94th birth anniversary, this blog-post attempts to trace his early steps in the forties which eventually set him on the path to become the emperor of Hindi film music. To encompass the greatness of a singer of Mohammed Rafi’s stature into one blog-post is not only impossible but will also not do justice to this incomparable jewel of Hindi film music.