Split wide open
PRIYANKA DASGUPTA
[ Thursday, June 01, 2006 08:22:30 pmTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
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Udit Narayan, Sonu Nigam, Sunidhi Chauhan, Babul Supriyo and a host of other singers are going through a bad patch in marriage. We tune in to the broken voice.
Life is never without contradictions. That's perhaps why those who lend their voices to the most soulful romantic numbers unfortunately do not get to sing them for their real-life partners for long.
Marriages of most of our popular singers are going through a bad patch. Udit Narayan's happy home with Deepa has received a severe jolt with the news of his alleged first wife resurfacing and leveling bigamy charges against him.
The princess of Bollywood playback - Sunidhi Chauhan - has long stopped living with husband Bobby Khan. Sonu Nigam's marriage with Madhurima too has been under the scanner.
Singer Anu Kapoor and wife Arunita are walking down the legal corridors. Adnan Sami is single now after having walked the aisle twice earlier. If sources are to be believed, even Abhijeet's marriage with Sumati seems to be going through a rough patch now.
And the latest jolt comes with the news of Babul Supriyo and wife Ria deciding to separate after 11 years of marriage.
One of the primary differences between marital separations of stars (be it Aamir Khan or Prosenjit) and singers is that while most of the stars come from broken families, divorce is still a taboo word in the middle class background of the singers before they made it big in Mumbai.
Ask Babul Supriyo what went wrong in his love nest and the singer says that after 11 years of marriage the couple has grown to think differently.
"Let me tell you that anyone who says being married is being in paradise is either lying or has received an expensive gift from his/her spouse for saying that in public,"Supriyo says on a lighter note.
Abhijeet too skirts the issue on a lighter vein saying, "No singer should marry only twice. They should all be like Kishore Kumar,"says Abhijeet.
What about rumours about his own marriage going through a rough patch and he moving out of home to a different flat? "I don't want to say much about it now. All I can say is that there is no smoke without fire... Ja rote tar kichuta to bote."
Nigam, of course, prefers to be tightlipped about the whole issue. His message read: "Hey... sorry... it's my personal life.
Any other question, you are welcome."But sources in the industry confirm that he and Madhurima live separately and there are very few occasions when one gets to see the duo making public appearances together.
Chauhan married early (date of marriage 02.02.02) at the age of 18 and her video director husband is a good 12 or 13 years elder to her and some believe the age difference and ego hassles could have rocked the marriage. Moreover, many feel that Chauhan didn't want to jeopardize her career by suffering a bad marriage.
Another major reason cited for all these separations is the increasing number of stage show commitments that keep the singers away from family for long periods of time.
Says Supriyo, "Well that could surely be one of the reasons! It's not easy to stay away from home so often. But why talk about entertainers? Look at the sporting fraternity worldwide. Maybe, it's the changing face of society. Marriages are made in heaven but broken on earth is probably how the age-old saying should be rewritten today."
Rumours of extra-marital affairs and physical proximity with fans from opposite sex during overseas tours have not helped to improve the health of such marriages these days.
Not that singers indulging in extra-maritals is a new phenomenon in Bollywood. Stories do the rounds of how yesteryear singers during their heydays would have permanent rooms booked at five-star hotels to satisfy their carnal desires.
Long periods of loneliness also generated stories of wives back home indulging in flings. The only difference now is that there are more ways of tracking the infidelity of the spouse.
"Earlier, a person could get away saying that he was busy recording without the spouse having a clue that he was in bed with another girl. But today, one can't keep the mobile switched off every evening and expect the wife not to raise an eyebrow if one fibs and says there was no signal available inside the studio,"says an industry source.
While earlier most singer wives who came from non-filmi background would suffer all for the sake of the children and were scared to move out of a life of comfort, today's women are more vocal.
"There is a saying in the industry that an artiste is like a bird and the wife should let him fly. If he returns to you, he is yours. But the point is how far should a woman of today allow her husband to fly and should she accept him back once he returns?"asks Arunita Kapoor. But does work suffer when relationships are not too easy going?
"Ami oi sob natokbaji kori na... I can separate my professional from my personal life,"says Abhijeet. Music director Pritam says, "Singers have their good and bad days.
Emotional trauma obviously effects their voice and if they are terribly unhappy with their relationships, it isn't easy to sing a romantic number."Perhaps Kaifi Azmi felt the pain and wrote the lines, Tum itna jo muskura rahe ho/ Kya gham hain jisko chhupa rahe ho...
priyanka.dasgupta@timesgroup.com
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