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 R.I.P Rajesh Khanna

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Posted on 07-18-12 10:30 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Posted on 07-18-12 5:45 PM     [Snapshot: 556]     Reply [Subscribe]
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Posted on 07-18-12 7:59 PM     [Snapshot: 661]     Reply [Subscribe]
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that was very touching nice clip, 

 
Posted on 07-18-12 8:09 PM     [Snapshot: 672]     Reply [Subscribe]
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Months before he died 

 



 
Posted on 07-18-12 8:24 PM     [Snapshot: 700]     Reply [Subscribe]
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Posted on 07-18-12 9:24 PM     [Snapshot: 778]     Reply [Subscribe]
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 Thanks for the link, Riddle bro. 
Knew lot more than I had known before.
Really interesting to learn about how he cultivated the way of romancing totally at new level :D 
Hats off to Amitabh Bacchan as well. 
 
Posted on 07-19-12 6:33 PM     [Snapshot: 1031]     Reply [Subscribe]
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In the 60s movie Aradhana, Rajesh Khanna sported a Nepali "bhaadgaaule topi" (at 00:36 in the video) with the backdrop of the Darjeeling Hills. And the Nepalese people immediately took notice. It is said Kishor Kumar and R D Burman solidified their working relationship on this very first venture which also became a musical superhit.

RIP Rajesh Khanna








 
Posted on 07-19-12 7:40 PM     [Snapshot: 1070]     Reply [Subscribe]
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Nice song.  Beautiful setting.  They came all the way to Darjeeling to shoot that song, rest of Aaradhana was filmed in Kashmir or somewhere Northwest India, I think.

I was trying to see which Alistair MacLean book was Sharmila Tagore sporting.  Any idea?  I had read all of Alistair MacLean novels when I was in high school.  One of my favorite authors, right up there with John Le Carre.

By the way, riding beside the Toy Train... bad idea.  I was hanging on the door of that train once, enjoying the view.  Later I found that my head was covered with soot from the coal-fire engine.


 
Posted on 07-19-12 8:00 PM     [Snapshot: 1070]     Reply [Subscribe]
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 उह बेलाको जस्तो दमदार फिल्महरु बन्नै छाडे , 
Thanks for this nice share, Geetmaijawafdeu !
 
Posted on 07-19-12 8:08 PM     [Snapshot: 1089]     Reply [Subscribe]
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Nep(ali_Ame)rican,

Back in the day, The Guns of Navarone  was synonymous with Alistair MacLean in the school library.

Based on some detective work on my part also, the one you are curious about seems to be

When Eight Bells Toll

 
Posted on 07-19-12 8:23 PM     [Snapshot: 1120]     Reply [Subscribe]
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How Rajesh Khanna gave Amitabh Bachchan a "tutorial in acting"

Among the chorus of celebrity voices raised in lament for actor Rajesh Khanna who died at home in Mumbai yesterday, none is more poignant or credible than that of Amitabh Bachchan. Mr Bachchan co-starred with Mr Khanna in Anand (possibly Mr Khanna's most famous role), and Namak Haraam. Together, they were they highest paid actors in Eighties' Bollywood.

Amitabh Bachchan, usually prompt with opinions on his blog and Twitter, was late to the online dirge for Mr Khanna because he rushed to be with the bereaved family at Aashirwad, the Khanna bungalow on Mumbai's Carter Road. But he more than made up for his tardiness with this heartfelt tribute to his former co-star on his blog.

Mr Bachchan begins his piece by recalling the time he first saw Mr Khanna in Filmfare magazine. He had just won the Filmfare talent contest, to which Mr Bachchan had also applied and been rejected: "I first saw him in a film magazine, perhaps Filmfare. He was the winner of the Filmfare-Madhuri Talent Contest, a contest that I had applied to in the coming year and been rejected. His film 'Aradhana' was my next meeting with him, at the Rivoli Theatre in Connaught Place in New Delhi, which my Mother took me along to see. The packed audience and their reactions to this young handsome man was impermeable.

The early, or shall I say preliminary rejection of my attempt to compete in the Filmfare-Madhuri contest, had made me leave my settled job in Calcutta. I had come away home to seek the possibilities of joining the Industry in some other way. But one look at Rajesh Khanna made me realize that with people like him around, there would be little chance or opportunity for me, in this new profession !"

Mr Bachchan also wrote about what an honour it was to be cast opposite the more famous actor inAnand:

"Soon after I was being cast opposite him in 'Anand'. This was like a miracle, God's own blessing and one that gave me 'reverse respect'. The moment that anyone came to know that I was working with THE Rajesh Khanna, my importance grew. And I gloated in its wake. During the breaks in the shooting of the film I would return to Delhi and gleefully describe the scenes and dialogues of the film, as also its music to all that I met - and I met many during that time ! There were no CD's then, just the spooled tapes, and getting Hrishi da to part with one such for me, was an exercise in futility. But I was able to get one and 'kahin dur jab din dhal jaae ..' played endlessly on my very repair stricken tape recorder."

Mr Bachchan remembers Mr Khanna as being "simple and quiet" with a "quiet elegance." He talks about how the late actor's fans travelled from far and wide, even from Spain, to meet him. 

He relates an anecdote about showing up a day early to wish Rajesh Khanna on his birthday. Mr Khanna made light of the ensuing awkwardness and asked Mr Bachcan to stay to dinner. The next day, on Mr Khanna's actual birthday, he asked Mr Bachchan to dinner again.

But Mr Bachchan's most telling recollection is this one:

"When the shooting of 'Anand' began at Mohan Studios, Hrishi da's favorite locale, now a concrete housing colony, the one moment that always worried me was, that last scene when I break down after his death and urge him emotionally to speak ! Not being able to find a method in my own very limited acting experience, I sought the help of Mehmood bhai, in who's house I was living with his brother Anwar Ali. And I still remember what he told me -

He said, "just think Amitabh, R- a- j- e- s- h K- h- a- n- n- a is dead !! and you will get everything right".

It was not so much a tutorial in acting that he expounded. It was an exalted acknowledgement of Rajesh Khanna's presence and position in the psyche of the nation, that he was drawing my attention to.

Many years later, Mr Bachchan was to present Mr Khanna with the IIFA Lifetime Achievement Award.

Bollywood lore suggests that the rise of the Angry Young Man in the late Seventies did not sit well with Rajesh Khanna, the reigning star of the time, and that he treated the young Amitabh Bachchan quite unkindly on the sets of Bawarchi, where Mr Bachchan used to visit his future wife Jaya Bhaduri. 

But Mr Bachchan's own memories draw a much softer picture of the fallen star, giving the lie to legend.

 
Posted on 07-20-12 9:28 AM     [Snapshot: 1300]     Reply [Subscribe]
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Posted on 07-20-12 10:05 AM     [Snapshot: 1326]     Reply [Subscribe]
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nice share, flojo,
thnks :D 

 
Posted on 07-20-12 10:07 AM     [Snapshot: 1322]     Reply [Subscribe]
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Posted on 07-20-12 2:55 PM     [Snapshot: 1413]     Reply [Subscribe]
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 I despise tragedies. 
 
Posted on 07-20-12 5:23 PM     [Snapshot: 1485]     Reply [Subscribe]
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Documentary - A good Watch
Rajesh Khanna - Bombay Superstar (Part 1 to 9)
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWmucHoZN3U&feature=BFa&list=PLFB1621F109B46928



 
Posted on 07-20-12 5:59 PM     [Snapshot: 1515]     Reply [Subscribe]
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nmc bro , thanks for the post. I will certainly check it out when I'm home :D 


 
Posted on 07-20-12 6:09 PM     [Snapshot: 1535]     Reply [Subscribe]
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 Looks like sajhaities are doing thesis on Rajesh Khanna. Great work guys, got something to kill the time and know some valuable thing. 
 
Posted on 07-20-12 6:21 PM     [Snapshot: 1551]     Reply [Subscribe]
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karnali blues, probably they must be your parent's idol as well.
Just respect, nothing much.
 
Posted on 07-21-12 10:48 AM     [Snapshot: 1679]     Reply [Subscribe]
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Rajesh Khanna - The Man That Never Was
Read from the link below.
(Source: http://blandspice.****blo****g***spot.in/2012/07/rajesh-khanna-man-that-never-was.html
. Remove the **** characters from the link and it should work. Sajha thinks I am trying to hamper their cash register)

(It's Saturday...it's raining here and it's my day off.. what the heck!.... Here it goes, just my opinion).

To start with, Rajesh Khanna could not dance well enough; something obviously expected of a superstar. Neither did he demonstrate convincing fight scenes nor do I remember him handling a gun like a pro on screen. Before bestowing that eternal "Superstar" tag to him, one has to realize that in Bollywood, most of the boiler room work of a successful movie is done by the playback singers and musicians. Notice that majority of his movies has the indomitable playback voice of the time, i.e. Kishor Kumar and perhaps RD Burman's or others' music. Music is what sells Bollywood well inspite of a hodge podge and a banal storyline. That was exactly what successful film-makers Yash Chopra and Firoz Khan understood very well and maintained close relationships with the main players in that area.

In all fairness, one of the most talented actors in Bollywood of the last fifty years, might very well have been our own "Jwaai Saap", the one and only Govinda. For God's sake, the man can dance like Jeetender, fight like Dharmender, cry like Rajender, and make-laugh like JohnnyLever. Two things that he deficiently lacked were Amitabh Bachchan's Baritone Voice to deliver punchline-dialogues in one of those "formula movies" and yes also Amitabh's Lefty Hand which when toying with a pistol in an undecided manner throws the bad guy into trepidation whether AB's character is going to "Shoot or Not?".

Can't over-stress the importance of music here again. For instance, would Amitabh's movie Sharaabi be so intoxicating without Kishor's voice in numbers like Inteha Ho Gayee or Manzile Apni Jagah? Along the same line were Namak Halaal, Yaarana, Muqaddar Ka Sikander, Laawaris. In those movies Kishor's voice and more importantly his heart emanated through the winning songs. Unlike Rajesh K's ephemeral stardom, Amitabh was more of a talent and a star. In the final analysis, Kishor Kumar's singing prowess was a huge multiplier of either of those talents or any of other actor's during that generation.

More contemporarily, the music talents who have been driving Bollywood in the post-era of Kishor Kumar, RD Burman Laxmikant Pyarelal and other players might be A R Rehman, Udit Narayan and some other relevant talents after Kumar Sanu priced himself out with his ego and compensation demands. Udit Narayan's legacy has been well-cemented after he sang for record blockbuster DDLJ to Shah Rukh antic's in the number Ruk Ja O Dil Deewane and Pehla Nasha in JJWS for Aamir Khan.

Back to Rajesh Khanna's stardom, the game was over after the fans came to their senses and cash-registers stopped ringing. In the own words of the blogger in the link above: "Reclaiming superstardom is like waiting to be struck by a lightening a second time.", Rajesh Khanna's stardom was more of a fluke than a real genius. No wonder, I have never met any new Nepali who is below 30 years of age and carries a first name Rajesh.
 

Last edited: 21-Jul-12 12:50 PM

 
Posted on 07-21-12 11:41 AM     [Snapshot: 1733]     Reply [Subscribe]
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Here goes the original blo***g

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Rajesh Khanna - The man that never was

 

Rajesh Khanna was a mediocre talent who sold on his looks and mannerisms for some years of his life, before his face started resembling a pudgy strawberry-pie and his buns started tearing the seams. As an actor, his chosen career, he was briefly a superstar and always a ham. His epitaph had already been written forty years ago and might have looked better if he had passed at just the right time, like Monroe did.
Not that he was without tricks. His mannerisms, and that peaking bloom of youth, were used by the likes of Shakti Samant and Hrishikesh Mukherjee to shape some of 70’s cinema’s best magic moments. Classics which owe as much to their directorial and casting skills as much to RK’s brief but infectious jawaani zindabaad. Yes, the man had a trick up his sleeve but it was a single trick. A one-trick pony he remained. Avatars and Sautens were triumphs of cinema rather than the man since RK remained stuck in the same mannerisms.
Rajesh Khanna was not a superstar. He was a supernova. A brief explosion in the galaxy, outshining all other stars, but fated to oblivion once the gas was spent.
The tales of hysteria I heard, first-hand reports, were difficult to digest since the first movies I saw of the man were stuff like Maqsad, and not Anand or Aradhana. Hell, the man had already become a caricature of himself from “Aapki Kasam”. I would wonder if there was any girl who survived a suicide attempt the night he married Dimple, and went on to become a happy mother, career-woman, socially-active ­ What passed through her mind when she looked at the geriatric wigged man fist-fighting Jeetendra and trying to do an Aradhana in the eighties?
 
A million and one treacly tributes would pour today brimming with clichés. Superstar. India’s greatest romantic star. Pushpa. Anand. Mere sapnon ki raani. Haathi mere saathi. Anju Mahendru. All 70’s. Maybe Tina Munim and Avatar from the 80’s.
 Here, instead of what the man never was, the mask of a superstar his “fans” had reduced him to, even to himself, I would like to reflect on what the man remained once the mask crumbled.
 
Rajesh Khanna from interview here: “when I started slipping, I hit the bottle. I mean, I am not a super human being. You are not Jesus Christ and I am not Mahatma Gandhi. I remember that once at three o’clock in the morning I was pretty high on spirits and suddenly it was too much for me to stomach because it was my first taste of failure. One after another, seven films had just flopped in a row. It was raining, pitch-dark and up there alone on my terrace, I lost control. I yelled out. Parvardigar, hum garibon ka itna sakt imtihan na le ki hum tere vajood ko inkar kar de,’ … It was because success hit me so much that I couldn’t take the failure.
 
Ah, stardom. That encounter of a bit of talent, looks or mannerism (sometimes none of these, as in the case of Shahid Kapoor) and chance. The right person at the right place at the right time. Exploding over the powder-keg of media hype. Sometimes, the encounter happens before the media picks the scent. Sometimes, “they” just break the putty of old collapsed stars and slap it into another blinking shape. Backstreet Boys. Britney. Bieber. Vacuous non-entities with just enough aesthetical potential to make over and fill time-tested marketing concepts that would always rake in fresh celebrity-mania: boybands, angsty kohled rebel teens, boy toys, sex symbols, nation’s heartthrobs.
 
Sometimes, the talent sticks through the stardom because there is enough of it to survive on its own. What we call talent is essentially hard-work and if someone is willing enough to work that far enough without the limelight, chances are he would survive the brief blinding flashlights and the fervid screams beyond. Look at Beatlemania. They survived it, finding their own creative niches afterwards. At the end of the day, they were all talented musicians, who thought themselves as ones and kept working at it.
Where are those cutesy boy-bands? You don’t want to know. You don’t want to meet those guys in their 40s. Some would be bitter, very bitter and might even break your head in alcohol-doused rage. Others, hopefully, might have turned philosophical or spiritual and see their brief undeserved stardom in better perspective (as RK seemed to in the interview). Deluded others might have locked themselves in their castles and are still playing the stars to an audience of servants, or they might be in a rehab with shaved heads and suicide attempts, desperately demanding back our attentions. It is that tattered human bits that remain once the limelight has passed over that bothers me.
 
The stardom RK got was brief because that charm he had was brief. Charms usually are. In the end, it all comes down to brass tacks. He was an actor and he was a bad actor. But not all of us are the best at what we do. We can only aspire to excellence. Being good is not important to keep us working, aspiring to be better is. And that’s where we have to love what we do. Nobody, other than the utterly deluded Ed Woods, remained mediocre once he had put in hard work in what he did (assuming it was not a whale climbing a tree). Look at John Cusack who survived being a teen celebrity by working hard at being an actor. Greatness comes to few, but professional satisfaction percolates a few branches to all who try. Honest hard-work is life’s own reward.
Carlin was Carlin as he reinvented himself not once, but twice. 70’s and then 80’s. He did not end up as a has-been recycling the same “Indian Sergeant” or “Seven words” to a thin sympathetic audience. His standards of how good he was came from within him.
Unfortunately, there would be no Carlin for RK. RK was a bad actor and remained a bad actor. He was never into acting, just stardom. He never was interested in playing roles for what they were, only as the Rajesh Kha-nna would play them. He came for the fame and never thought beyond. Or perhaps, by the time he could, it was too late. And there was his grief and tragedy.
You cannot work towards superstardom. It happens. Things beyond your control. Kismet. Fate. Reclaiming superstardom is like waiting to be struck by a lightening a second time.
You can work towards excellence. That is within your control.
 
And stardom is not important in the first place, our humanness is. We are humans, first and last. It is better than being “next to God”. Stardom, the kind that RK experienced, is a most dehumanizing experience. Delinked from the quality of our work, like undeserved praise, it satirizes us. It traps us in an image we are either not or were. It takes away our now ­ if we never get over it.
 
My fans will always love me ­-
Bull shit. They never loved you in the first place. They never love anyone. They are briefly convinced they love someone, before the media machinery and chance picks the next thing for them to drool and scream over. Those that might still love you, those stalkers with no lives and those smitten girls who have aged with you and remained loyal, love a mask of you that belonged to another time. Give them the real deal, with all the human frailties and oddities, and they won’t recognize you. Your close ones love you -­ friends, family, those random associations life throws at you. They know you and they still love you. Most importantly, you can love yourself. (And I am not talking about the delusional ASN Norma Desmond sort.) You can love yourself when you like what you are. And you are what you do. The impact you make, not in scale but in meaning and intent. You can love yourself if you can, like those who love you, accept yourself for the human you are; ­ if, at the end of the day, you are a man you would like to shake hands with.
[Disallowed String for - bad word] the fans. Forty years after your decline of fortunes began, you were left repeating your stock mannerisms to an audience of table-fans. I only hope that deep down you knew by then the bestial silliness of it all and were secretly laughing at it all. That’s a dignified way to go.
 
 
PS: This was a tough piece to write. The man is dead and his earlier movies have touched me greatly. But I believe that I pay far more respect and homage to the “man” here than all the unthinking tripe.
 
 

5 comments:

the saint said...

I like the way you write, and also the courage it takes to write such a piece at this time - and though I don't disagree fully or agree fully with everything you say; Salut!

ankur said...

Performance talent and success have never played one to one. But it is not luck, but some celebrity talent...

Alam said...

Whether he is good or bad depends on the yardstick you choose to judge him. I can't say much about acting. But it seems he was a very successful crowed puller. Many enter movie business to be a star and he got himself made into a superstar. That might be the one trick of this pony ....but its a big trick.... And was the biggest in his day and time

Alam said...

Whether he is good or bad depends on the yardstick you choose to judge him. I can't say much about acting. But it seems he was a very successful crowed puller. Many enter movie business to be a star and he got himself made into a superstar. That might be the one trick of this pony ....but its a big trick.... And was the biggest in his day and time

Bland Spice said...

@alam I don't take that his trick worked. But this guy had to suffer for his undue stardom for forty years. he did. my argument is that life is not about the ephemeral dust of stardom, but of constantly reinventing yourself, or just being in peace with the human in us.

 


 



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