Singer Tochi today made headlines with the news of him undergoing treatment for depression and high blood pressure at the Bombay Hospital. According to news reports (DNA and Times of India), he has lost ‘a lot of’ lucrative performance opportunities because a website (BollywoodHungama) mentioned his name as ‘Toshi’ (the Star Voice of India/ SaReGaMaPa guy who composed a song in Raaz – The Mystery Continues, along with his brother, Sharib). For the record, there are many sites that continue to assume that the singer in Dev.D’s ‘Pardesi’ is Toshi. I even assumed, when I saw Tochi’s name on the CD first, that its a spelling error that is so common with record labels.
Nobody intended to discredit Tochi for his vocals in Dev.D, to be specific, intentionally or with malice. In fact, I was not even aware of Tochi’s existence and Toshi being a composer and singer came into my mind naturally. Tochi suing BollywoodHungama is a terrible move – he needs support from an influential bollywood site like that. BollywoodHungama has put up a corrigendum to this effect and that resolves the issue. If anything, Tochi should have a bone to pick with Toshi, since event/ concert organizers would naturally have asked him to sing ‘his own’ song from Dev.D and it looks like Toshi saab hasn’t said anything – to the effect of bringing Tochi to abject penury!
Tochi’s manager should have the ingenuity to advise his client to ease the issue – not aggravate it. That would have meant contacting BollywoodHungama and demanding a change and an update.
Finally, I can’t really believe that all those 50 odd event organizers were web-savvy enough to check BollywoodHungama alone and calling Toshi based on the only two songs Tochi has sung – A Wednesday’s ‘Bulle Shah’ and Dev.D’s ‘O Pardesi’. Sounds far-fetched and literally means that Tochi cannot attribute his monetary loss to one site’s error, however influential the website is.
