Pune hospital inmates send birthday wishes to Lata didi

Pune, Sep 28 (IANS) A couple of hundred patients and employees of the Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital here chose a novel way to join millions of music lovers in showering best wishes on living legend Lata Mangeshkar to mark her 80th birthday - they wrote their hearts out in fond one-liners on a big-size board and sent its photograph to the nightingale.

'The patients, including participants of a healthy heart-walkathon comprising discharged hospital inmates and employees wrote beautiful birthday wishes for Lata-didi in their own language with some of them drawing up tiny pictures of flowers or caricature of the world's most loved singer,' a hospital source told IANS.

The most touching among the wishes was perhaps a line plucked from a famous Lata Mangeshkar song from a Hindi film 'Dil Apna aur Preet Parayee' that goes ...'Tumhe aur kya doon mein dil ke sivay, tumko hamari umar lag jaye' (What else can we give you other than our heart... may our remaining years be added to your life). The poetic wish was signed by a few seriously ill patients, the source said.

The hospital was constructed five years ago with funds donated by the singer in the memory of her father music maestro Deenanath Mangeshkar.