Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; May 17, 2018)

“Don ka intezaar to gyrah mulkon ki police kar rahi hai lekin Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahin namumkin hai...” Four decades later, this iconic dialogue in Amitabh Bachchan’s distinctive baritone still resonates. Yes, the line has been reiterated by Shah Rukh Khan in Farhan Akhtar’s 2006 remake, Don: The Chase Begins Again, but for me Don will always be the Big B.

Chandra Barot, who directed the 1978 crime thriller with Bachchan in the double role of Don and Vijay, has fond memories of Farhan as a boy of four when he’d drop by their place for the script, which was co-written by his father Javed Akhtar and his erstwhile partner Salim Khan. “My film is still remembered for its brilliant lines, including 'Mujhe jungli billiyan bahut pasand hai'. I was surprised when I found some of them repeated in the new Don. I always gave the credit for the film’s success to Salim-Javed’s fantastic script,” says Barot who turned director to bail out his cinematographer-friend Nariman Irani.

Irani was in the red after his 1972 film, Zindagi Zindagi, flopped. He was the cinematographer for Manoj Kumar’s Roti Kapda Aur Makaan and Barot who was the assistant director on the social drama, along with its actors, Bachchan, Zeenat Aman and Pran, decided to collaborate with Irani on his second production that would help him pay off his debts. Don opened in 1978 which boasted of several other Bachchan starrers, including Deven Verma’s Besharam, Sultan Ahmed’s Ganga Ki Saugandh, Ramesh Behl’s Kasme Vaade, Yash Chopra’s Trishul and Prakash Mehra’s Muqaddar Ka Sikandar. He had also given the voiceover for Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khilari which released the previous year.

“Raj Kapoor saab’s Satyam Shivam Sundaram also arrived in 1978 and it seems incredible that Don put me in the league of these ace directors,” says Barot. He recalls how Dilip Kumar had raved about the film to Ramesh Sippy and Manoj Kumar after seeing it at a special trial and the latter had groused that he had yet to see it. Barot had assisted Manoj Kumar for nine years and admits that on the first day of the shoot, he was influenced by his mentor-director while taking his first shot. It had Bachchan as Don, using Helen with a gun to her head as a human shield to get away from the cops, telling her, “Yeh tum jaanti ho ki yeh revolver khali hai, main jaanta hoon ki yeh revolver khaali hai, lekin police nahin jaanti ki yeh revolver khali hai.” After the take, Irani groused that Barot’s long shots were taking the focus away from Helen’s beautifully lit face. “After that, though I still thought like Manoj Kumar, I’d execute the shot like Chandra Barot that gave Don its distinctive stamp,” he reasons.

The above mentioned scene was preceded by Helen’s seductive “Yeh Mera Dil”. They’d booked Mehboob Studio for two days, till 10 pm, but wrapped up early on the second afternoon. Barot decided to shoot a small scene of DSP D’Silva (Iftekhar), approaching Vijay with a picture of his lookalike asking him if he had seen the man before. “The studio’s canteen was turned into Vijay’s home in the slums, his two foster children visible through the wire mesh. We had no idea what Don would look like, so we used a picture of Amitabh from Premji’s Majboor, suave in a jacket. Vijay was dressed in a lungi from Hill Road and a red shirt,” he informs.

Before the film was completed, Irani died in an accident while working on another film. Barot plodded on. On Manoj Kumar’s suggestion “Khaike Paan Banaraswala” penned by Anjaan for Dev Anand’s Banarasi Babu but not used, was incorporated. “Anand ji (of Kalyanji-Anandji, the film’s composers) was my neighbour and I’d often bump into him late at night when he returned home, his lips stained with the red of beetal juice from chewing paan all day. So I ordered 30-40 paans and made Amitabh eat them all before the shoot. The next morning he was cursing me because his mouth was corroded from the chuna,” Barot laughs.

The film was released without any promotion and he remembers going with Bachchan to check out the hand-painted, life-size posters as they went up. “Critic Devyani Chaubal wrote it off as a flop but one of my photographer friends, Rahul, sent me a picture of crowds snaking around Tardeo’s Ganga Jamuna, as also Excelsior theatre, when the advance booking opened. After it opened, bandwallas would play 'Khaike Paan Banaraswala' and 'Yeh Mera Dil' at weddings,” he says, adding that at musical shows abroad, Bachchan would enter to the tunes of “Main Hoon Don” and bring the curtains down with “Khaike Paan Banaraswala.”

Barot who attended one such show in New York, after Bachchan recovered from the near-fatal blow delivered on the sets of Coolie, remembers the rush of Indians at Madison Square Garden and policemen patrolling on horseback. “A surprised local admitted he had never seen such crowds even for a Michael Jackson concert and so many Indians thronging the venue,” he laughs, asserting that the Don lives on going by all the compliments showered on him when his directorial debut turned 40, not just from strangers across the world, some who wanted to make a documentary on the film, but also friends like Manmohan Shetty, Sanjay Gadhvi, Jaya Bachchan and Helen whom he would call Helenski on the set.

A veteran journalist on writing the autobiography of one of Bollywood’s most mercurial heroes
Meena Iyer (MUMBAI MIRROR; January 8, 2017)

In my 37-year-old association with the temperamental star, an ammusing moment while working on this autobiography stands out. Rishi Kapoor and I were taking our Q&A sessions at a coffee shop outside his Bandra home and as he ordered stir-fried veggies for me, he asked, utterly baffled, “How can anyone be vegetarian?” I laughed heartily, because this was quintessential Rishi Kapoor for you. Honest, brazen, unapologetic. “Honestly what do vegetarians eat? Ghaaspoos?”. He then joked that once a year, during Navarati, he did succumb to his herbivorous instincts and even that was a “hard and boring period for him”.

Many of my colleagues wondered if I had, out of some subconscious masochism, willingly walked into the lion’s den by choosing to work with one of Bollywood’s most eccentric stars. To be honest, I had done exactly that in the mid-80s, so his fits and rages were like old hat to me. I was then working with Star & Style and our columnist, the feisty Devyani Chaubal, had written a singularly nasty piece about him. He was livid. Since I was the greenhorn and the only unsuspecting one, my colleagues sent me to “break the ice” with Rishi Kapoor. And boy, oh boy, did I get a dressing down. I was quaking like a leaf when I returned to office; I was, suffice to say, altered. However, a week later, I was pleasantly surprised when he called me and gave me a no holds-barrred interview. Now, three decades later, here I was writing his life story.

Whether jovial or cranky, Rishi Kapoor’s hospitality never fails you. Food and beverages are served based on the hour of the day (or night). So if you’re there at 11 am, you are offered chaas, but if you’ve overstayed your welcome until 7.30pm, then it has to be Black Label. Some things never change in Bollywood, one might add. It also helps that Rishi Kapoor suffers from OCD and is meticulous about everything, down to his puja ritual, during which he will always light only naag champa agarbatis in front of the deity and listen to bhajans for the better part of the morning. On the other hand, a radio has to play continuously in his bathroom or bedroom, and his own repertoire of 350 odd songs, which dominate playlists even today, continue to exhilarate him. So it had become perfectly routine for me to be deep in conversation with the actor when he would suddenly jump up and go, “That’s my song!’’

Did I extract enough juice from a rather controversial innings in B-town? He was clear from the start that he didn’t want any ‘muck’. “If someone is looking for salacious details of my life, they will be disappointed,” he maintained all through. “I’m not about to give anyone vicarious pleasure by writing rubbish. But I will be as upfront as I can,” he said.

His 37-year-old marriage to Neetu Singh, for one, did have its share of fights, but about that he was not willing to get into. “When we got married, Neetu, who was at the peak of her career, quit to stay home. Before we tied the knot, we had decided that one of us would be the homemaker and the other would be the bread-winner. I was bowled over and I am totally indebted to Neetu for choosing to stay home, raise kids and hold the fort. And I was very sure, I would not give her any reason to complain.”

But then, just as I was about to give up, just when I thought that his very own claim that “this book is not to be a hagiography” was merely lip service, I was taken aback with his candour. Because when Rishi talks, he talks: he opened up about his father Raj Kapoor’s tempestuous life, his long silences with Neetu, his formal relationship with his superstar-son Ranbir, his tryst with Dawood Ibrahim, fisticuffs and fiery outbursts with colleagues back in the day. Over many cups of coffee and servings of stir-fried veggies, emerged a man who was funny, sad and honest — all at the same time. Contrary to his recently acquired brash and boisterous Twitter personality, Rishi Kapoor is as vulnerable and fragile as his porcelain-like visage from Bobby.

Speaking of Bobby, he spoke utterly honestly about being possessive about his first co-star, Dimple Kapadia, and how, despite that, they both overcame this to remain friends. He spoke of his shaky but steady relationship with Amitabh Bachchan. And most importantly, he also spoke about fighting clinical depression soon after his marriage. In a milieu where so much of our preoccupation with celebrity culture is about what goes on between a celebrity’s legs, working on this book taught me that it can indeed be refreshing to figure out what goes on between a celebrity’s ears for a change.

That dressing down from my Star & Style days finally seemed worth it, after all.

Khullam Khulla: Rishi Kapoor Uncensored
by Rishi Kapoor and Meena Iyer, published by Harper Collins, releases next week