Madan Mohan Kohli was born on June 25, 1924, at Baghdad, Iraq, where his father Rai Bahadur Chunilal was working as an Accountant General with the Iraqi Police, Madan Mohan spent the first five years of his life in the Middle East. As a boy of two, Madan Mohan used to spend hours listening to gramophone records and cultivated the uncanny ability to recognize and pick up any record from a pile of hundreds. After Iraq won independence from Britain, Rai Bahadur Chunnilal migrated back to India. He took his family to his home town, Chakwal in Jhelum district of Punjab, now in Pakistan, and left them in the care of Madan Mohan's grandfather, Hakim Yograj- a famous doctor. Rai Bahadur Chunilal left for Mumbai for business opportunities and subsequently became a partner in the Bombay Talkies studio and then in theFilmistan studio. Later, Madan's father shifted the whole family to Mumbai and Madan became acquinted with some children of film personalities. These 'children' were Raj Kapoor, Nargis & Suraiya. At the behest of his father, he joined the army and received his first commission (emergency) in 1943. Though as history would have it, he quit the armed forces and turned to his first love—music. He joined All India Radio in Lucknow, where he brushed shoulders with such ghazal and classical luminaries as Ustad Faiyyaz Khan, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Begum Akhtar, and Talat Mahmood. He picked up their influences and carried them with him to Mumbai when he entered Bollywood. Not <b>…</b>
