In a 2012 chat with Rediff, Asha was asked about working with Boy George back in the day and she recalled that she wasn’t fluent in English so when he would ask something in his accent, she would take a few moments to respond. “I still don’t know English because we went to vernacular medium schools. Once, at an international concert, I was performing along with Boy George. He asked me in his thick English accent, ‘Asha, what does ‘Chura Liya Hai Tumne’ mean?’” she shared. Recalling her response to him, she said, “I started fumbling; I didn’t know how to respond to this guy. So I was like, it means ‘I have stolen your heart’. He blushed.”

Asha performed with Boy George at her Wembley concert in 2000 and at the time, he described it as “the most perfect song I have ever done. It was the happiest time of my life, and is a song I treasure above everything else in my life.”

In many previous interviews, Asha had shared that as children, she and her older sister Lata Mangeshkar were inseparable. In fact, Lata would take Asha to school with her until one day, when the teacher objected to it. Lata, annoyed at this, refused to go to school after that.

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Asha went to another school in Kolhapur and a few years ago, she shared clips from her visit to that school. “I was very, very naughty in my childhood,” she recalled and added, “Always singing… I was a singing star even at that age.” She shared that her teachers would often ask her to put up impromptu performances. “They would ask me to sing and dance. So I was always singing there,” she shared.

Asha started singing professionally at the age of 10 after her father Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar passed away.