This year multi-starrer Sholay celebrates 50 years of its blockbuster success. Jai Santoshi Maa (JSM), minus the bluster and pomp of a glamorous tinsel town titilator, also celebrates 50 years of its commercial triumph at the box office.

And what a triumph it was!

The music of Jai Santoshi Maa alone sold the highest number of gramophone records, at the time, for erstwhile music label HMV. No other film’s music before Jai Santoshi Maa had the cash registers ringing for the monopolistic music company the way the song ‘Main toh aarti utaron re’ had the nation’s women dancing to its garba beats.

Ahead Usha Mangeshkar’s 89th birthday (December 15), The Free Press Journal spoke to her — the film’s lead singer and the film’s only prominent surviving member — to peek into the past and relive th

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