From a Railway Platform Song to a Recording Studio

Ranu Mondal was born into severe poverty and, according to The Week, lived in poverty for most of her life. In the 1980s she performed at local community functions with her husband, Bablu Mondal, who played drums, and she says she shared stages with well-known Bengali singers. She has four children from two marriages, and the article says they do not take care of her.

After her husband's death, she earned a living by singing Bollywood hits on local trains in West Bengal and by begging. She travelled on the trains without a ticket. The article says she lost her mental balance and much of her memory, and that she had no house of her own, staying in a deserted house in Begopara that belonged to someone else.

In August 2019, Ahindra Chakraborty, an engineer from Ranaghat, noticed her singing Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar songs at the Ranaghat railway station in Nadia district, about 80 kilometres from Kolkata. He filmed her and uploaded the video to Facebook, where it went viral and made her an overnight sensation.

The composer Himesh Reshammiya called her to Mumbai to record a music video, and she was flown there. People from Kolkata began travelling to Ranaghat to meet her and give her gifts, and the music director Bijoy Sil recorded her voice for a festival song.

Her daughter, Sathi Ray, found her through social media after more than ten years apart. Even so, the article reports that she still had no house of her own.