I am passionate about Hindi film music and especially venerate Lata Mangeshkar’s music. I also teach statistics to undergraduates and very recently, I dipped my toes into the vast ocean of machine learning (ML) techniques to analyse data from a household survey. Therefore, the description of this book was fascinating, as it appeared to sit snugly at the intersection of the three fields I have been dabbling with—music, statistics and ML.
The opening sentence of the preface sums up the problem with the rest of the book: ‘Writing a book on Lata Mangeshkar is always a challenge for any author.’ (Millions of Lata fans who have hopelessly tried to emulate her extraordinary musical prowess would add one more phrase to this … and trying to replicate the minutiae in her singing that distinguish the great from the outstanding… is a challenge for any singer.) However, I digress.