Lights, Camera, Conversation… “A star is gone”

Some thoughts and recollections on the death of a pop-culture phenomenon, and the gradual dying of an era.

When news broke of Rajesh Khanna’s death, and as countless Indians grappled with the shock with tweets and Facebook posts, I was wandering aimlessly around the stores at Hong Kong airport, having hobbled off a 16-hour flight. That’s a long time to spend scrunched up in a chair, willing sleep that won’t come and yet not fully awake, and being force-fed Asian vegetarian meals that, when opened, flood the stale air with a swift pungency that’s borderline embarrassing. The ensuing layover isn’t much fun either. You’re too tired to read and you force yourself to walk because your legs need the circulation. And everything is so brightly lit that the disorientation is doubled – it’s endless daytime, no night in sight. This is not a state of mind that allows intense emotion. I logged into an airport computer and saw a message on my blog: “Rajesh Khanna RIP.” I paused for a second. Then I signed out.

I expected that, once back home, I’d be flooded with grief, not so much because I was a bloodletting fan of Rajesh Khanna – I liked him a lot, but I wasn’t exactly a twentysomething girl in the late 1960s – but because every time a touchstone of an era crumbles to dust, we lose another link to our past. Our childhoods become evermore distant, ships on a sea of time that become increasingly speck-like as yet another mooring cable snaps off. We pine partly for Rajesh Khanna, partly for the era when he was a star, when we were younger, when things were simpler. Nostalgia is selective about what it enshrines. We don’t remember, for instance, what a nuisance it was to place an STD call; we only recall long, food-filled train journeys with the promise of excited cousins at the destination. These fond flashbacks, I imagined, would finally dredge up all that emotion.

But I felt nothing, and I think the reason is the recent ad that Khanna made for Havells fans. The opening is tremendous, with his voice booming over the screams of hordes. “Ask me about fans,” he says, over images of him from his heydays, filled with affectations like the one where he looks at the camera and squeezes his eyelids shut, as if squinting from sunlight. These images are intercut with those of Khanna in the present day, striding towards a doorway framing a powerful white light – he appears to be heading to some sort of stage. Only, he steps into a room filled with fans – actual fans. He turns to us and says no one can take his fans away from him, and it comes off like a cruel joke, as if these whirring contraptions were the only admirers he was left with, this cadaverous man whose voice still dripped with delusions of grandeur. You can tell, sometimes, when someone is dying. Rajesh Khanna, from this ad, was clearly slipping into a different kind of white light. The subsequent hospitalization wasn’t a shock. His death wasn’t surprising either.

Rajesh Khanna, on screen, was less a painter with a boundless palette than a mechanic with a serviceable toolbox. His tools included a pair of twinkling eyes, a slow-spreading smile, a rapid patter that would slow down suddenly into a drawl, like a train whose driver had spotted an elephant crossing the tracks and applied the emergency brakes, and an acute-angle nod that made his neck appear as if it were a tensely coiled spring sheathed with skin. When the part came along that could be assembled with these tools, Khanna was very good, the way he was in Anand, a movie made at a time when an audience did not know to smirk when a man embraced another man and declaimed, “Maroge to meri baahon mein.” (You will die in my embrace.) Off-screen, Khanna’s story was more fascinating, a life filled with hubris and bad judgment. In our country, we tend to revere the superhumanly humble, as if famous people owed it to their devotees to become saint-like, even godlike. But Khanna stayed resolutely lifelike, till the end a thrillingly flawed human. These are the stories of which exciting biopics are made.

I was too young to be in thrall of Khanna’s pan-nation stardom, but as if in compensation, I seem to have undertaken a pilgrimage trailing him across a portion of the country. There was Madras, of course, where I saw his films, in theatres and on TV. (His astounding songs, needless to say, were always around, as inescapable as the swelter of summer.) Then in Bangalore during a holiday, my mother (a fan of Jaya Bhaduri more than Rajesh Khanna) and I kept seeing ads announcing a re-release of Bawarchi, but both times we went to the theatre, the film playing was Prem Kahani. (Both times, naturally, we watched Prem Kahani.) In Kanpur, my uncle took me to see Ashanti, a Charlie’s Angels-inspired revenge saga of which I remember but two things: an exciting (for its time) chase where a car veered into the middle of the road and plowed up the median, stake by stake, and a fuzzy scene where Shabana Azmi’s character was photographed in the altogether. (You can’t hear a line like “Woh meri nangi tasveerein thi” and not have it scorched into your brain.) Lastly, in Pilani, where I studied, I ended up being ragged by seniors, one of whom bore the name Suraj. He wanted me to guess how he, a Tamilian, came to be called something so unusual. He must have taken pity on my terrified silence, for barely moments later he told me why. His mother, he smiled, was quite the fan of Aradhana.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.

Posted in: Cinema: Hindi, Lights Camera Conversation