Raj Kapoor's favourite and also Benazir's: Mukesh and his melodious career

Few singers are so fated as a later rendition of the song that launched their career happens to be the last one of their life. This Hindi film singer, whose smooth and sonorous voice rendered a gamut of iconic songs for three decades for top heroes from Dilip Kumar to Dharmendra, Raj Kapoor to Rajesh Khanna, and Sunil Dutt to Amitabh Bachchan, was one of these few.

Mukesh, who would have turned 99 on Friday (July 22), rose to prominence with "Dil Jalta Hai" from "Pehli Nazar" (1945), a song he so faithfully essayed in the style of his idol K.L. Saigal that when the legendary singer heard it later, he said it was so strange that he had absolutely no idea of having sung it.

And 'Dil Jalta Hai", which he introduced to the audience as his life's first, was the last one he sang in his 1976 US and Canada concert trip, during which he succumbed to a massive heart attack in Detroit.

As Mukesh became a leading singer, and subsequently, the preferred voice of Raj Kapoor in all his films -- those made under the showman's own R.K. Films banner or otherwise, it was all due to two musical titans who weaned him off being a Saigal clone.