Mumbai, July 21 (TIWN): What moves the heart more when listening to a song? Polish and perfection, or the raw emotion that the performer brings to its rendition?

Geeta Dutt, born Geeta Ghosh Roy Chowdhuri, who passed away on this day (July 20) 50 years ago, seemed to have all it needed to make a successful career in films.  Performing in front of a mike for the first time as a teenager, she left industry veterans open-mouthed at the wealth of feeling she could convey with her voice, went on to do a string of songs that resonated across the country, and capped it all with a fairy-tale wedding to an intense and capable emerging star -- Guru Dutt.  Born in 1930 into a wealthy landlord's family in what is now Bangladesh, her family left it behind in the early 1940s and moved to Calcutta and then Bombay. She was just 16 when composer Hanuman Prasad chanced upon her and gave her a few lines in his mythological film "Bhakta Prahlad" (1946).  It was S.D. Burman, who was then impressed with her, and made her sing in "Do Bhai" (1947) -- where the initially reluctant producer Chandulal Shah was so impressed that he signed her on the spot.  It was the Dilip Kumar-Nargis starrer "Jogan" (1950), where she rendered a brace of Meera bhajans with a rare sensitivity and restrained anguish that brought her to the spotlight, and "Anandmath" (1952) only increased her value.  Geeta Dutt went on to proving that her sketchy training in music was no bar to her effortless and effective rendition of a wide range of songs, from the deeply spiritual to the skillfully sensuous, to those dripping with pathos to the gently flirty, and the playful to the profound.  Out of her more than 1,400 songs, those in landmark films like "Anandmath", "Aar Paar", "Baazi", "CID", "Pyaasa", "Devdas", "Jogan", "Kaagaz Ke Phool", "Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam", among others, are ample evidence of her talent.