Mere paas Shashi hai
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Every evening show at his Prithvi theatre, he is wheelchaired in, he watches every play and when the place is emptying, waves bye bye, nods, or just smiles tiredly.
I waved to him last week after a show of Veenapani Chawla’s Tortoise and the Hare, and he smiled. And to think there was a time when he’d be sparring with me about a review or chatting genially in the course of a drive through the outskirts of Bengalaru where Utsav was being filmed. Before the unit lunch, he’d check if the mishti dohi he had ordered specially from Kolkata had arrived. Of course, it had.
Lately at the MAMI film festival, he was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award. And the fan in me just had to reflect and write..
That his influence has been undervalued. Those who do not thunder, bellow, hubble or bubble, carry out elaborate death scenes, are not viewed as great actors. He didn’t participate in any of those acting tricks, he just made every little emotion – love, hate or something in between – so darn effortless, that he was to a camera born. Casual, cool, collected.
Shashi Kapoor was my hero, I-wish-I-was-like-him poster boy of the 1960s. Terrific looks, coiffed and cologned, a jagged but disarming smile, neatly turned out. He advanced a fashion statement with those flapper collared silk shirts – floral printed! – and bell bottoms. Many of his films credited wife Jennifer with the costume designs; below her credit, there would be the name of the Taj Mahal Hotel boutique, Burlington’s. The boutique is still there, you cannot walk past it without thinking of Shashi Kapoor.
Angrezi ka mausam
Shashi Kapoor with his wife the late Jennifer Kendall
When you look at today’s actors, there may be inheritors of the Dilip Kumar-Raj Kapoor-Dev Anand styles – but there’s no one who comes quite close to the Shashi Kapoor charisma which was always equated with the “western..angrez” stereotype. Nasir Husain, who directed him in Pyar ka Mausam (1969), once said that his hero’s appeal is essentially to the urban audience, but added, “When he leaves all his questions and doubts at home, then he appeals to all, be it to a college student or a truck driver.”
Indeed it was facile to call Shashi Kapoor “westernised”, and unfairly sourced in his personal life, since he had a ‘memsahib’ wife. Also his roots in the theatre craft of the Kapoor clan as well as that of the Kendals’ Shakespearana made him an oddity of sorts. Hey, here was an actor who had travelled abroad extensively, believed in the Bard and literature, and actually spoke in his interviews about his elaborate English breakfasts on Sunday. And what do you know?.. Jennifer Kendal Kapoor and he even had a library with books that were actually read! And there was that music system playing Mozart, Bach, Beethoven.
For a starry-eyed boy studying in a Bombay school – the Cathedral and John Connon — where other students considered Hindi films infra dig, Shashi Kapoor was a guilty pleasure of sorts. When the Shakespareana troupe arrived at Cathedral one afternoon to stage excerpts from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he was royally ignored. Or perhaps other students had not heard of him yet. Because Ivory-Merchant’s The Householder (1963) had arrived and vanished, faster than breeze, from a handful of cinema halls.
In that, he portrayed a man very babu and lower middle class in his values. Just the opposite of what he was in real life. Earlier, his B R Chopra film Dharm Putra (1961) had tanked, since it dealt with the serious issue of communal strife. Both The Householder and Dharm Putra were black-and-white, he wasn’t a glamour-exuding star yet. That afternoon, I was the only one who asked him for his autograph which he gave with much ceremony, asking me my name, where I live, and how come I knew about him.
Chat amiably with a boy who’s been tracking him, and the actor has him hooked for life. Years later, I was to tell Shashi Kapoor that I had written him a fan letter but had received no reply, a snub which can snuff out adulation immediately. “Naaaah, come on,you didn’t,” he laughed. “You are not the type who writes fan letters.” Well..
Fan..tastic!
The fan in me surfaced for Shashi Kapoor. He was so likeable in Jab Jab Phool Khile (1965) as the poor Kashmiri who falls in love with swanky Nanda, and its songs were so marvellously picturised, that I couldn’t miss a single movie of his, and it had to be seen first-day-first-show.
I ended up liking his films, which are hardly on the recall file today: Mehndi Lagi Mere Haath (1962), Mohabbat Isko Kahte Hain (1965) and Neend Hamari Khwab Tumhare (1966), all teaming him with Nanda, and a slick whodidwhat titled Aamne Saamne (1966) opposite Sharmila Tagore. Shashi looked best with La Tagore but was more successful with Nanda, forming a ‘hit pair’ in the magazine terminology of the time. With Hayley Mills in Pretty Polly (1966), he cut a sharp, saturnine figure..but the film was not up to scratch.
There was a lull in his career, ascribed to that ‘western’ personality. The return came with Sharmilee (1971), a womancentric thriller in which Shashi Kapoor carromed between the double roled Raakhees. Occasionally, there would be the odd movie like Dil ne Pukara (1967) in which Rajshree had to make a choice between him and Sanjay Khan. I remember a reader’s letter in Filmfare, then, in which a woman reader wrote, “But where’s the competition between the two? Which woman would not opt for Shashi, eyes closed?” The lesser-known work of the actor is also his most appealing, as in Suhana Safar (1970), Abhinetri (1970) and Paap aur Punya (1974).
Shashi Kapoor, Nirupa Roy and Amitabh Bachchan in Deewar
I am not sure whether I liked him playing second fiddle to Amitabh Bachchan at all. Bachchan got all the powerful scenes in Deewaar (1975) but there’s that silver lining here. It was Shashi Kapoor who delivered that classic line, “Mere paas maa hai.” But take Do aur Do Paanch (1980), what the hell was he doing, not quite putting on a convincing show in a project that required a zany approach. The actor’s flair for comedy, sporadically evidenced in movies like Pyaar Kiye Jaa (1966) and Shaan (1980) was never quite exploited completely.
Although the wizard of madcap comedy Manmohan Desai did cast him in the nondescipt Suhaag, it was Bachchan and Rekha who were given all the crowd-pleasing footage. Before that the director had cast Shashi Kapoor in the more ‘serious’ Aa Gale Lag Ja (1973), absurdist but narrated with a straight face, like the finale showing our hero going haywire on roller skates.
Producer ka Junoon
With time, alas, in mainstream commercial cinema Shashi Kapoor was typecast in nice-guy roles, be in Namak Halaal (1982) or Ghungroo (1983). Shashi Kapoor was accepting the backseat, presumably because he didn’t relate to the leads being offered to him, and because he was shifting gears towards the production of films of the sensible kind. Monetarily, those films burnt him. Still that was his most admirable phase, as the producer of Shyam Benegal’s Junoon (1978) and Kalyug (1981), Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane (with the performance of a lifetime by Jennifer Kendal), Girish Karnad’s Utsav (1984) and Govind Nihalani’s Vijeta (1986). Perhaps, he was hoping to break into the international market, an idea that was far ahead of its time. Junoon fetched rave notices in the international press and was much-sought-after at international film festivals.But that was it..
Shashi has not been able to take criticism easily though. My review of Junoon raised his hackles and at our first face-to-face meeting at a film festival in Kolkata, he was anything but cordial. Subsequently, he thawed and how. If I was interviewing him, he would insist, “Listen ask me tough questions..or I’ll fall asleep.” He didn’t fall asleep.
Those films didn’t fetch him money. And the only film he directed Ajooba (1991) shoved him to brink of bankruptcy. The film industry spoke about him in whispers. This did affect him. Compounded with the loss of Jennifer to cancer, he appeared to have lost his love for life and cinema. Never have I see a man turn from an Adonis to a corpulent figure overnight, the excess weight and disinterest were there as if to say, “Who cares?”
Gradually, he perked up and the dazzling smile returned, but it was evident that he had withdrawn into a shell, spending his quality time with his grandchildren.
All the world’s a stage
At his home in Atlas Apartments on Malabar Hill, there was a small waiting room which the household laughed was the “chamcha room.” There the flatterers and the gainseekers would congregate when Shashi Kapoor was in the gravy. Today, he has shifted to an apartment in Juhu, adjoining the Prithvi theatre. The theatre has been maintained for decades by Shashi Kapoor under the helmsmanship of his daughter. The hub of the city’s theatre activity, it is a magnificent gift to the city by the actor, in memory of his father Prithviraj Kapoor who straddled the worlds of theatre and cinema.
Almost withdrawn from the entertainment world, Shashi Kapoor still talks fondly of the late Ismail Merchant, a producer who could sell the Buckingham Palace. The collaboration between the producer, the actor, director James Ivory and at times, author Ruth Prawer Jhabwala, are an entirely different subtext of his life and career. The films are a delectable assortment ranging from the moodily elegiac (Shakespearewalla, 1965) the playful Bombay Talkie (1970), the yearningly nostalgic Heat and Dust (1983) and In Custody (1994) which showcased him as an aristocrat gone to seed. This performance, in the latter phase of his career, is remarkable for its implosiveness.
Mr Elegant
Out of the Ivory-Merchant fold, New Delhi Times (1986) sees him in an unforgettable performance, as real as it incisive about the machinations of the media.There are countless performances I can open out from the vaults of my heart right now, but suffice it to say that his early films especially catch him at his subtlest, like Bimal Roy’s Prem Patra (1962) and Benazir (1964) And he has that ability, too, to snatch an entire film away from under the nose of the leading man – as in Ijaazat (1998), an elegant punctuation before the end.
Of the three Kapoor brothers, Shashi was the youngest and the most boyishly endearing of them all. Raj Kapoor directed him in Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978) but everyone looked uncomfortable before the half-clad Zeenat Aman gambolling across in 35 mm.
Shashi Kapoor, born, Balbir Raj could have retained his Peter Pan looks but chose not to. He would have been so right in a Satyajit Ray film, so right in Seemabadha and Shatranj ke Khilari, for instance. Yet he made no pitch to the master.
That certain smile
Today Shashi Kapoor, at 71, accepts the popping flashbulbs of the paparazzi with visible bemusement. He doesn’t accept awards. I had fallen at his feet to accept the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award, and he had just smiled an inscrutable smile. There was another occasion to request him to accept another Lifetime Achievement Award. The request was made to him on board an aircraft. And he said, “Naaah, you know how I am, sweet of you but…now behave yourself..go fasten your seat belt.”
I don’t exactly know why he has been allergic to awards, but I was thrilled that he consented to accept the festival’s award.He’s not so stubborn after all.
And for that I would like to write him a fan letter once again…to say, “Thank you sir for your art..and for being my poster-boy of all time.”
Tags: 36 Chowringhee Lane, Jennifer Kendal, Junoon, Kalyug, Shakespearwallah, Shashi Kapoor, Utsav, Vijeta
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Nostalgic. Touching. Sensitive. Memories of a lovely era. Shashi was the zing in the 70s Hindi cinema’s zang.
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Khalid Bhai,
Till now I had an awe for your words. After today I will have a great reverence for the ‘human’ face of Mr. Khalid Mohamed.
take a bow.
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Awwww. Hey labor_day_sale n oz, shashiji is truly spectacular, never got his just recognition. Ditto Rishi Kapoor. That’s why me a total Kapoorian,
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Interestingly Shashi and Rishi, have played both father & son( Kabhie Kabhie) as well as brothers( Duniya Meri Jab Mein).
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One rejoinder,
Shahshi did play one of Satyajit Ray’s character in a TV-Series called Satyajit Ray Presents and directed by Ray’s son Sandip.
It was role of the cult detective Felu da. His role, already immortalized by Soumitra thru two of Ray’s own works, was scorend by Bengalis. But I believe, people not acquainted with Bengali Felu da just loved him.
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Shashi to me was a natural, effortless actor, some one who could slip into the role without trying too hard. While he more often than not, played 2nd fiddle to AB, there were movies like Kabhi Kabhie, where he made an impact, you seriously wanted to have such a friendly Dad like him. I did like Aa Gale Lag Jaa, if you could overlook the cheesy climax. Also in the 70’s, he went into the action phase with movies like Fakira, Chor Machaye Shor, most of them entertaining.
One really good movie of Shashi i recall was Basera, in the early 80’s i think, he is married to Rakhee, she gets mentally upset after knowing her sister Rekha is a widow,and Shashi is forced to marry Rekha, and later Rakhee comes back. Though it was dominated mostly by Rakhee and Rekha, Shashi still manages to leave an impact as the understanding husband. It was one of my Mom’s favorite movies, of course along with Kalyug and Vijeta, which she would play endlessly on the VCR.
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Nice article. Wonder what you actually wrote about Junoon which I think was a nice film, that triggered him off, .
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Nice article and helped fill my mind with some positive thoughts! Personally, as a kid I got my hair done in the Shashi Kapoor way which remained with me for a long time :-) Not to take the light away from him, I always felt that Shammi Kapoor and Rishi Kapoor were far more talented than him and they didn’t get their due as well..especially Shammi. He was generations ahead of his times. The other day I was watching Teesri Manzil, he was so effort less, which is a trait that could be seen in Rishi Kapoor as well. Shashi Kapoor had it too, but his awkwardness showed when he was playing all those mundane characters which was diffcult for me to ignore. Throw a Shammi Kapoor or Rishi Kapoor in and they would completely make you believe in the characters they were playing, however mediocre they might be. At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I see these traits in Ranbir as well. His acting seems so effortless, boy, I am excited or what :-)
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Lovely article.Truly a tribute article.I think he was great in Junoon and New Delhi Times.He may have been one of the very few actors who acted in all genre of movies..depicting probably the phases of his life and work.
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What a piece of writing. Throughly enjoyed.
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Khalid Saab a wonderful tribute to a wonderful personality.I’ve always admired Shashi Kapoor for the wonderful performances over the years and also for having produced some genuinely different movies.
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Lovely! And I couldn’t agree more. His range, his ability to be a strong but not overpowering part of almost any cast, and his effortless skill in so many kinds of projects should be shouted from the rooftops!
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Beautifully written, and aptly about a lovable yet an almost forgotten man…. Shashi Kapoor, with none of his sons making it big and his daughter being away from most of the media glares, had almost completely lost off the radars for most… he’d become a rememberance of past… one article… revived him back … nicely written sir..
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WOW..Nice tribute Khalid Sir.He has been one of the finest actors in Indian cinema.
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Is there anyway I can send Khalid an (fan)email?
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Beautifully written article. Thanks Khalid
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Wonderful piece on Shashi Kapoor. I agree completely that he never got his due. Maybe because he wasn’t passionate enough on screen? Kabhi Kabhi was a very memorable film of his – but again he was just a foil to Amitabh in it. I didn’t know he was only 71. If only he still retained his enthusiasm for films – he could have opted to continue acting – would have been a pleasure to watch him. Any chance of your sharing your review of Junoon with us? Very intrigued!!
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A wonderful tribute. If at all Shashi kapoor felt he didnt get enough due, he should read this piece.
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Loved the films where he played second fiddle to Amitabh. Big B had something that Shashi and Vinod Khanna didnt. Cant put it down to a T. But it was obvious that AB would be the lead. Maybe it was his agreeing to do roles which audiences related to which must have made the difference. Otherwise, Vinod and Shashi had the personality, talent and the looks. Well who’s complaining. We like the underdog more!
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beautifully worded post on the man who deserves all the praise. keep the flag flying khalid saab.
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Wonderful tribute to the actor Khalid saab…
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Touching. Thanks Khalid.
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Great post Khalid! Please write more such articles. We get a peek into such wonderful lives which go unnoticed by the media world.
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What a lovely appreciation of Shashi Kapoor. I hope he knows how much he’s loved. I am surprised when I see he’s thought of as “forgotten.” In the smallish world of the western Hindi film devotee, where time is kind of irrelevant, he is not — he’s deeply admired and discussed, and winning new fans every day.
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The first time I ever saw him, in Shakespeare Wallah a long time ago, I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen on a movie screen, and I’ve never changed my mind.
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brilliant khalid sahab….keep walking down your memory lanes, and those small but significant bylanes :-)
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New Delhi Times is a movie which I have trying to get hold on for a very long time, but in vain. I have very vivid memories of this movie when I had seen it as a kid. Later, when I grew up, I had been looking for a cd/dvd of this movie for a very long time. Sometime ago it showed available on fabmall but by the time I could order it went out of stock. My search for its dvd is still on.
Sashi Kapoor as a producer was fabulous. Some of my favorites of his are the ones produced by him esp Kalyug.
Thank you for this write up
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Brilliant writing on a brilliant actor’s odyessey in Indian Cinema!
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Brilliant Khaled….will always remember Shashi for ‘Vijeta’, perhaps the only movie where a Sardar character is shown without any stereotypes…..
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Hi Khalid,
Nice post.
Was surprised not to find a mention about Muhafiz. Anyway, watch the movie for Shashi Kapoor.
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He did mention “In Custody”
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Khalid,
You have different faces for writing.. everyone unfolds with subtle smile.
Rajan
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Khalid-ji,
Wow, what a passionate article. Well written and was a pleasure to read.
Neerav
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Please write more such articles than the rabble rousing reviews where you bring in your personal biases into the equation. Cheers.
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Tooo Good….he has a gr8 actor…splly i liked his dancing style…quite unique i say
…cheers to khalid for this article!!!
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Wonderful post sirjee, loved every bit of it! Now I can say I know something about Shashi Kapoor.
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Kalyug, Vijeta, New Delhi Times…
Always been a fan, shall remain so…if only I could see him in person just once…
Thank you
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Ijaazat – 1987 rather than 1998 as mentioned.
Nice writeup.
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Amazing! Though I was never a great fan of Shashi Kapoor, reading this article changed my view. Though Dewaar is today remembered for Amitabh, Shashi was great delivering Mere Paas Maa Hai. He was flamboyant, handsome and so effortless in his acting.
Liked the way you wrote the article – Any Hindi movie buff would start liking Shashi after reading this. Thanks for such a beautiful piece – and your proximity to him made the difference
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Beautiful article…Khalidsaab you need to revive and review some more actors(Character roles or Leading artists) in future every week hereon.
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I remember in 1984, when I was a boy of 4, ‘Shashi Cooper’ (that’s the way I pronounced his last name’, was my favourite actor by far. I was lucky enough to get a picture of mine clicked with him, where his hands rested on my shoulders. He had an unmatched aura/elegance about him and was down-to-earth in his demeanour. The true gentleman in the Hindi Film Industry.
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Here’s a ’stop smoking’ ad campaign starring Shashi Kapoor. Undying style
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFFw9XCM_RU
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Khalid saab, I think you should have wrote a bit more about his comic side.”Pyar Kiye Ja” is an underappreciated classic and it deserves its place alongside JBDY , Chupke Chupke etc in Hindi cinema history.It is certainly way better than the overrated Andaz Apna Apna.
Also, I think he did a few more out and out comedies, which have been lost from collective memory.
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