I don’t have the clip for “chanda ka dil toot gaya”. I’m sure someone else on this forum would be able to provide you with the clip. By the way, I found Sajjad’s comment on Talat interesting. I was listening to that gem of a song Talat delivered for Sajjad in Sangdil, “yeh hawa yeh raat yeh chandni”, and was wondering what “galti” he could have done. Sajjad was definitely not amused when Madan Mohan used that tune in Rafi’s “Tujhe kya sunawoon main dilruba”.

I have access to Noorjehan’s songs and I listened to a couple of them composed by Firoze Nizami in the 50s. I think it’s better not to get into the Lata vs Noorjehan comparison because it is not appropriate for this forum and also because it is going to be an unfair comparison. Who knows what would have happened if Sahir and O. P. Nayyar stayed back in Lahore, Ghulam Haider and Noorjehan stayed back in Bombay, Geeta Roy (Dutt) stayed back in dhaka, and Mehdi hassan stayed back in Rajasthan? We can keep speculating but it will take us nowhere.

But we rafians are eternally grateful to our beloved singer for announcing “yeh hai bambai meri jaan” and enthralling his fans for the last 60 years. Will there be anyone like him?

Raju Bharatan in the Illustrated Weekly of India writes:

Could you believe that end-July signalled full 13 luckless years
without the charismatic voice of Mohd. Rafi? I, for one, couldn’t
believe it, if only because I discerned that it was during these
very 13 tuneless years that Rafi had grown more dominant in our
vocal imaginations. Whether it be TV or radio, his vocals have
been even more vibrant in the years he has been away from us.
Shabbir KUmar, Anwar, Mohd. Aziz, their performing stature dimin-
ishes with every year that passes without Rafi.

So unique is Rafi’s vocal mystique that he is always throwing up
new areas, for example, not one anniversary article on Rafi
touched on how this big-hearted tenor *made* small-time com-
posers. It is this lacuna we now seek to fill in a resonant reply
of some Rafi’s all-time hits for the lesser-known music direc-
tors. The idea is to spotlight Rafi’s role in keeping the
small-time composer professionally alive.

Remember an obscure 1953 C-grade film called “Khoj” for which
music was scored by Nissar Baazmi, the man who later went to Pak-
istan and became such a big composer there that even Noorjehan
and Mehdi Hassan considered it an honour to sing for him. Yet so
long as Nissar Baazmi was in India, he somehow remained a C-grade
composer. And at the time he did “Khoj”, he was literally a no-
body.

This was when Baazmi approached Rafi to sing for the maximum Rs
50 that his producer could afford for the rendition of a composi-
tion on which he prided himself. And Rafi charged Baazmi just the
token Re 1 to produce for him, in Khoj, the memorable Radio
Ceylon hit, “Chanda ka dil toot gaya roney lage hain sitaare”.
This Raja Mehdi Ali Khan lyric began with the cry: “Mohabbat aur
wafaa kis tarah tauheen ki tu ne”. What a compelling sense of
expression Rafi brought to this tune of a struggling composer!