FLYOVER COMMOTION DEADLY COVID
There is no place as sweet as home, and Lata Mangeshkar was residing in her sweet home called Prabhu Kunj, located at Peddar road in Mumbai. She moved to Mumbai in 1945 and has seen the commercial conversion of the city since then. In an interview she said that the city was once very nice and comfortable to live in, but later it became a havoc. Moreover, her problem started when the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) proposed to construct a 4.1 km flyover on Peddar road. She and her sister, Asha Bhosle criticized the proposal. Their criticism had led the delegation of Pedder Road Residents Association, and they met the former chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh in 2001. They said that they would leave Mumbai if the flyover is built, and this had obliged them to suspend the construction. This is obviously true that the construction of such a flyover could cause many problems to the residents of Peddar road, as the buildings are very close to the road.
Till now the construction of the flyover was not done only because Lata Mangeshkar was residing there and she was completely against it.
COVIS-19 pandemic has caused a devastating crisis all over the world, and in India many people died because of this pandemic. It started in 2020 and caused the whole country to go into lockdown, and people became trapped in their houses for months. This has caused a great loss to Bollywood, and most artists and professionals became jobless. Apart from that, many well-known artists and actors suffered from this pandemic, and some even died. However, because of the good support from the government and the health professionals, many people were saved. In 2020, the well-known versatile actor Amitabh Bachchan, also known as the “Big B”, tested positive for COVID-19 along with the family members, including Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan (she was quarantined at home with her daughter). Amitabh Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan were admitted to the Nanavati hospital in Mumbai, which is known as a center for excellence. Both of them recovered successfully after staying in that hospital for a few days. Besides the Bachchan’s family, many other actors like Alia Bhatt, Ranbir Kapoor, Akshay Kumar and Aamir Khan were also infected by the virus but recovered later. However, not everyone was lucky enough to evade this virus. Actors like Bikramjeet Kanwarpal and Satish Kaul (who played the role of Ram in Mahabharat) have lost their lives after getting COVID-19. The two popular music directors Wajid of Sajid-Wajid and Shraven of NadeemShravan also died from the pandemic.
With that scenario in mind, Lata Mangeshkar seems lucky that she was not affected by the virus during the last 2yrs, when compared with the other people of the Bollywood who got infected early. On 1st Jan 2022, Lata Mangeshkar tweeted on Twitter with a blessing that this year everyone would become free from the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s very heartbreaking to find that she got infected by the virus after a few days. She was admitted to the Breach Candy hospital in Mumbai. Unfortunately, after struggling for more than 28 days in that hospital, she died on 6th February 2022. She was having respiratory problems in the past also, and in 2019 she was admitted in the same hospital for pneumonia, but she recovered. If there was no COVID-19 then she would have recovered this time also. The quality of the hospital and the doctor’s treatment also matters. If she was taken to the Nanavati hospital instead, then she might have been alive today. As Breach Candy was close to her home and Nanavati was far away, she was not lucky this time. But luck was in favor of Amitabh Bachchan because it takes only 10 minutes to reach Nanavati from his house but it would take 40 minutes or more to reach that hospital from Prabhu Kunj.
If Lata Mangeshkar was not infected with COVID-19, then she would have lived longer.