Golden Era of Bollywood: Mahendra Kapoor - The Most Popular Voice of Patriotism

Mahendra Kapoor's voice has always been associated with Manoj Kumar. His many songs filmed on Manoj Kumar, most of them are patriotic. He won a National Award in 1968 for the patriotic song Mere Desh Ki Dharti in the film Upkaar, the topmost playing song in All India Radio.
He was one of the golden era singers when Mohd Rafi, Kishore Kumar, Mukesh and Manna Dey was ruling the main platform of playback singers of the Bollywood. He remained as one of the most popular singer in the Bollywood who has given his voice to almost all of the popular heroes like Dilip Kumar, Shammi Kapoor, Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Shashi Kapoor, Biswajeet, Raj Kumar, Dharmendra, Amitabh Bahchcan, Manoj Kumar, Jeetendra, Vinod Khanna, Shatrughan Sinha and many more.
He was born in Amritsar, on 9th Jan 1934. He was a fan of Mohammad Rafi and created a style of his own moulded largely on Rafi, and won the Metro Murphy All-India singing competition, which led to his debut as a playback singer in V. Shantaram's Navrang in 1958, singing Aadha Hai Chandrama Raat Aadhi, under the musical direction of C. Ramchandra.
In a career spanning five decades, he sang more than 25,000 songs in various regional languages, including memorable hits like ‘Chalo ek baar chalo’ (Gumrah), ‘Neele gagan ke taale’ (Hamraaz), and in various language.
He got 3 filmfare awards and one National Award as best singer, he was also awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India.
He had three daughters and also one son. His son Rohan Kapoor is an actor and singer, who acted in a few films in the 1980s such as Yash Chopra's Faasle (1985) and Love 86(1986), and Prakash Mehra's Imandaar, and later did stage shows together with his father. He died on 27th September 2008, following a cardiac failure at his home in Mumbai, aged 74.