A star child’s life is tracked with a camera fitted on their bibs. It had happened with Rishi Kapoor too when his acting career began at 16 in his father’s Mera Naam Joker. After all, he was the first official star-son of the Bombay Film Industry.
In the early 1970s, what we were missing in Hindi films was the exuberance of the teenagers; their gawkiness, their tingling joy of holding hands for the first time, getting excited at her/his physicality, those misunderstandings… and then the hugs and make-ups, their brashness.
And so, Raj Kapoor created a hero straight out of Archie comics – the chikna, Punjabi boy with light eyes and a peculiar skidding laughter. Thus arrived Rishi Kapoor, Bollywood’s first teenage hero. Despite the Kapoor khandan’s tendency to put on flab, Rishi has remained the cutely loud, singing, dancing westernised teddy boy of Bollywood for the past 40 years.
Rishi’s autobiography Khullam Khulla (with Meena Iyer), published by Harper Collins is a flashback into his career and his personal life including his personal relationships. Rather than follow a chronological sequence of events, Khullam Khulla looks at various aspects of Rishi’s life from his viewpoint and dives into them eg: how a career in films was almost inevitable for him, his father’s influence, his equations with different siblings, his career hits and misses etc.
Most chapters therefore straddle multiple decades with spicy anecdotes and insights. The story-telling is like a roving camera that probes right inside Kapoor’s world and picks out his interactions with various members of the family, extended family, friends, rivals, his girlfriend with whom he had a traumatic break-up, and associates - and talks a little about how each person and incident played an influential role in his career and life.
The narrative therefore, has a relaxed chatty feel to it, without bogging you down with too much technical details about filmmaking. The anecdotes read like a cozy story-telling session of a young-old man to his family. Yet Khullam Khulla comes across as a serious book on how his career took-off, then hard-landed, then picked up again and reserved a slot in the wall of achievers and is now on his career’s 2nd innings.
Rishi makes no attempt to hide his depression during a bad phase, or how he connived to keep an arrogant star out of a family production, his fall-out with a few good friends, and his arrogance after Bobby’s success etc. There are startling stories of drunken brawls, scary brushes with the Dubai mafia, an open admittance to buying an award and open-speak about his father’s affairs. There is this stag-party braggadocio in the way Rishi blasts a former actress for denying having had an affair with his father. The masculinity in him couldn’t bear to see a medal from his dad’s coat snatched away.
While Rishi Kapoor the actor brags unabashedly about the money, fame and women, the old father in him laments missing out on the lost opportunity to love his son. He gently complains that he, in turn, grew up fearful of his father too. In Khullam Khulla, we get to see Rishi’s vulnerabilities and how he overcame them with the help of spunk, spouse and sips (of liquor). Nor does his wife claim that her dear husband has been squeaky clean throughout when it came to women.
What one misses is tales of camaraderie with old family friends Ramesh Behl and RD Burman with whom he had hung out together. And we are sure there was so much more to say with respect to Laxmikant Pyarelal, Subhash Ghai and Ravi Tandon. There is no mention at all of Ramesh Sippy who attempted a grand comeback of the Bobby couple. The Amar Akbar Anthony anecdote was particularly interesting. There could have been many more of those. In fact even well-known anecdotes on the famous ‘repeated bow’ in Mera Naam Joker where he imitates his father, or Dimple accidentally smearing her hair with besan in Bobby, which was a real life occurrence with Nargis years ago, are missing.
While it is an autobiographer’s prerogative to speak selectively, the movie buff is also an interested party. Also, there is a dubious story on why he declined Pyar Jhukta Nahi (1985). Rishi states that he declined the film because he was acting in Zamane ko Dikhana Hai (1981) and he did not want to play the father of a 6-year-old in Pyar Jhukta Nahi. But the two films were four years apart and ZKDH had well and truly flopped before Pyar Jhukta Nahi had even been conceived. The co-author could have taken more control of the manuscript and prodded Rishi into reflecting on these.
Rishi signs off in a quandary on who would shoulder the responsibility of the RK banner, and whether the RK banner would exist at all or not in Ranbir’s generation. The last chapter is reminiscent of a last Don’s musings in the retired phase of his life who knows that his children will not feel passionate about the legacy that he had grown up in. Their world would be unconventional and bold like Barfi! and Rocket Singh. And yet, the Don hopes that at least one of them would volunteer to carry the banner ahead. If this chapter is a clincher, the afterword by his wife is like a kindly wife scolding her naughty husband for overeating and staying aloof, and yet, defending the big-baby in public. There is no doubt that the two of them have been in love all these years.
Khullam Khulla is an intense book told in a simple manner. It is an ideal hammock-and-beer read that can be completed in 3 hours.
Title: Khullam Khulla
Author: Rishi Kapoor with Meena Iyer
Publisher: Harper Collins
Price: 599/-
(Balaji Vittal is co-author (with Anirudha Bhattacharjee) of the National Award winning book ‘RD Burman: The Man The Music’ and the MAMI Award winning ‘Gaata Rahe Mera Dil - 50 Classic Hindi Film Songs’)
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