To Richa's relief and joy things are slowly changing.

"And I've one amazing singer, Sunidhi Chauhan, to thank for this. How I adore that girl's voice! Her deviant voice makes me hopeful about the future for another kind of voices."

What both thrills excites and intrigues Richa is the fact that composers seem to give her a lot of elbowroom to improvise.

"It's rather gratifying but also scary. Aadesh always gave me room to innovate tremendously. For the 'Baabul' song he gave me only one brief. He gave me the words 'Babul mora naihar chutal jaye'. And he just asked me to sing.

"I sang for 15-16 minutes without any musical accompaniment. Of these only two-three minutes have been retained in the soundtrack for the lack of space, I guess."

One can hear Richa's looming regret at her luminous labours being edited so drastically.

"I've also sung the other number 'Kehta hai baabul', which Jagjit Singh and Amitabh Bachchan have rendered in 'Baabul'. My version has been kept out of the album."

But Richa isn't complaining.

"I won't say I'm satisfied with my career in film singing. But I'm happy. Whenever I go to a music director, there's a certain look of respect in his eyes. I cherish that above anything else.

"One of the high points in my career in films as a singer was when I was called by Sanjay Leela Bhansali after he heard me sing 'Mere maula', one of my favourite tracks, from 'Khakee'.

"Sanjay made my day when he said he was looking for me for a long time. I've sung a beautiful thumri for Monty Singh in 'Saawariya'. What a pleasure it is to sing for a filmmaker who knows what music is all about."