A LEGEND LIKE YASH CHOPRA CAN NEVER DIE

BY ALI PETER JOHN

If there is one man who has left the greatest impact on me as a human being more than a great filmmaker that the world knows him as, it is Yash Chopra. I normally don’t forget first meetings with people, but it is perhaps because of our several meetings over the years, at least one long meeting in a week without any appointment or any hassles with the security staff that I perhaps don’t remember the time I first met him, but I know that I had met him in his simple office at the Raj Kamal Studios owned by the legendary filmmaker Dr. V.Shantaram. He struck me as a very simple and unassuming man for the achievements that went with his name. He had moved into this office after his controversial break up with his elder brother, B.R Chopra who had given him all the opportunities to grow into the filmmaker he became after he made his first three films for his brother’s banner, B.R Films, ‘Dhool Ka Phool’, ‘Dharamputra’ and ‘Waqt’. He had directed other important films like ‘Aadmi Aur Insaan’ and ‘Ittefaaq’ for B.R Films after he had decided to launch his own banner, Yash Raj Films with the support of the big time financier Gulshan Rai.

It was after the grand success of films like ‘Deewar’, ‘Trishul’, ‘Kala Patthar’ and ‘Kabhi Kabhie’ that he left Raj Kamal and bought his own office at Vikas Park opposite Juhu Beach which was a complete office with every departments housed under one roof. It was on the second floor of the bungalow that he had his own office where he sat signing cheques more than doing any creative work for which he had a separate room in Vikas Park and a large room in his bungalow, ‘Adityaodaya’ named after his two sons, Aditya and Uday.

My meetings with him grew more regular when he shifted to Vikas Park and I made it a point to meet him even if it was for a few minutes whenever I was in the vicinity and never once in the more than thirty years that I knew him very closely did he make any excuse of being busy or having any other urgent work which could stop him from meeting me. It was during these meetings that I discovered the real Yash Chopra as he was, so very different from the image that was created about him by the media and by other people in the industry.

It was in this office at Vikas Park that he talked about Sahir Ludhianvi for hours and even recited some of his best poems in Urdu and expressed his gratitude to Sahir for inspiring him to get involved in his own poetry first and then get him obsessed to make a career in films in spite of knowing that his father wanted him to join the Indian Civil Services (ICS). He often talked about the long meetings he had with Sahir which were meetings where they shared their love for poetry even as Yash served Sahir the best of Scotch whisky, something which no one in the Chopra family had a weakness for even though they had the best of bars for guests and at some of the best parties they hosted.

It was in this office at Vikas Park that Yash, one of the busiest filmmakers found time to talk about his romances with beautiful women like Sadhana and Mumtaz. He went into a highly nostalgic mood when he remembered the best days of his being in love with Sadhana with whom he did only one film, ‘Waqt’ but who became his friend for life. He once told me how he spoke to Sadhana for twelve hours at a stretch at night. He also told me about how he was all set to marry Mumtaz but couldn’t because of the objection raised by ‘Bhaisahab’ (B.R Chopra) and the entire family. It was here that he told me that he could not work with an actress if he did not fall in love with her. It was here that he told me about how he married Pamela Chopra, an airhostess working with the then popular international airlines, BOAC. His ‘Bhaisahab’ wanted him to get married after he realized how he kept falling in love with his heroines and took him to Delhi to see a girl who they wanted him to marry. He followed his ‘Bhaisahab’s’ wish and went to see the girl and made it clear that he did not want to marry her.

There was a great deal of embarrassment, but Yash was in a position to have his say. Some time later, another meeting was arranged for him and when he saw that it was to meet the same girl, he believed that she must have been the woman marked by destiny for him and agreed to marry her. They had a very happily married life with Pamela (better known as Pam) helping him out to establish his banner, Yash Raj Films. They had two sons, Aditya and Uday who grew up to be avid lovers of cinema as they grew older and were of great help to their father who was busy establishing his banner.

It was at this Vikas Park office that he told me how grateful he was to men like Pran Mehra, a renowned editor of films, Kaygee, the cinematographer and of course, Sahir Ludhianvi who stood by him like pillars when he started building his empire.

It was at this Vikas Park office that he let me know how he took success and failure. He once described the party the entire team of ‘Waqt’ (Balraj Sahni, Sunil Dutt, Raaj Kumar, Shashi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore, Sadhana and others) celebrated the grand success of ‘Waqt’ at the Sun-N-Sand hotel, a party that started on the afternoon of the release and went on till the next morning.

It was at this Vikas Park office that he dreamt of casting Madhuri Dixit in a film when she was at the peak of her career. I often saw him sitting before photographs of Madhuri on his working table and intensely looking at them with both his hands holding his head. He told me he would find it easy to get her to do a film with him, but he was ‘scared’ of her secretary about whose dealings with matters of money and dates he had heard scary stories. I once felt like telling him to call Madhuri personally and he for reasons best known to him listened to my advice and called the then ‘number one actress’ and she agreed to come to the same office within no time, heard the story about the film he wanted to make (‘Dil Toh Paagal Hai’) and agreed to be a part of it. Yashji (as he was best known in the industry) raised the subject of her secretary and said he would deal with her directly and not through her secretary and he would not let her secretary interfere in anything to do with his film. Madhuri was so excited about working in a film directed by the greatest romantic filmmaker who she too dreamt of working with that she agreed to all his conditions and he was able to make ‘Dil Toh Paagal Hai’ (also starring Shah Rukh Khan and Karishma Kapoor) without any hassles and the success of the film gave him what he called ‘the kind of happiness I have rarely felt’.

It was at this Vikas Park office that he talked about Sridevi who he called ‘an acting machine which works according to some formulas which a director has to tap to get the best performance from her. She has switches all over her for different kinds of emotions which a good director has to be clever enough to know. You have to just switch on what feelings or what expressions you need and you have them instantly without any trouble of explaining or describing a scene or a feeling to her again and again’. It was this ‘acting machine’ with whom he made memorable films like ‘Chandni’ and ‘Lamhe’.

It was at this Vikas Park office that he received the news about his winning the Dadasaheb Phalke Award. I was one of the first to inform him about it as I had my source in the I&B Ministry who had told me about his winning the award. The day after receiving the award I received a call from him to see him in his office as soon as I could. I rushed to his office as it was always a great pleasure meeting him. He was again sitting with his head held between his two hands. I asked him what his problem was. He said he didn’t know what to do with the money (two lakhs) that he had received with the award. He (I still can’t understand why) asked me where and how he could give away that amount. I don’t know how an idea occurred to me. I had heard about the eighty year old daughter of Dadasaheb Phalke being very sick and dying with cancer in a chawl in Mahim.

I told Yashji it would be a very good gesture on his part if he gave away the amount to Ms. Vrinda Pusalkar, Phalke’s daughter and he jumped with excitement. He asked me if I could find out how the money could reach her. It took me only a few hours to know where she was living and to know that she had a grandson who worked in a bank. I got in touch with him and called him over to Yashji’s office the next morning at 11 am. He was only too glad and reached in time to know that Yashji had reached before time. Yashji gave him the kind of welcome he would have given ‘the father of the Indian film industry’ himself and then handed over a sum of Rupees two lakhs to him and told him that it was for his mother’s treatment. The young man could not believe his eyes and on his way back he told me, ‘I never knew there were such great men in the industry. We had lost all interest in films after knowing how Dadasaheb was neglected by it, but this man, Yashji has given back our interest and faith in the industry. My mother will certainly bless him and he will be much more successful than he is’.

It was at this Vikas Park office that he told me about his elder son Aditya who he said was crazy about films and saw every film of whatever genre every Friday at the first show anywhere in Mumbai. Aditya had joined him as his assistant during the making of some of his biggest films.

It was at this Vikas Park office that Aditya told him about the film he wanted to direct and Yashji blessed him and asked him to go ahead. The result was ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge’. The first time when Yashji realized that the film had earned Rupees eight hundred crores, he said, ‘itna paisa maine zindagi mein kabhi nahi dekha itni filmein banaane ke baad’. The box-office collections went on increasing and the film kept running at the Maratha Mandir for years.

It was at this Vikas Park office that he told me how he was scared of failure and when I had asked him what he did when one of his films flopped, he said, ‘I just go to sleep and don’t wake up for the next three or four days and then everything is normal and I am back to planning my next film’. He had the worst times when big films directed by him like ‘Vijay’, ‘Parampara’, ‘Lamhe’ and ‘Silsila’ flopped and the industry was ready to give him up as a lost case, but he fought back with films like ‘Chandni’, ‘Dil Toh Paagal Hai’, ‘Veer Zaara’ and what was unfortunately to be his last film, ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’.

It was at this Vikas Park office that he told me about some of his favourite things like good food and he could rattle of names of hotels and dhaabas anywhere in the country and the various foreign locations he shot at. He also made it an unwritten rule in his company that the entire unit would get the same food and snacks, from the stars to the spotboys and other workers...

All this changed after Aditya Chopra built the sprawling Yash Raj Films Studios where he built a huge and extremely well furnished and decorated office for the founder of Yash Raj Films with a garden attached to it where he took his walks after completing work for the day.

It was now difficult even to enter the gates of Yash Raj Studios and if I had to meet Yashji, I had to pass through security and then three other secretaries but I still took all the trouble because I knew that the man who I would meet at the end was going to be the same Yash Chopra I had always known, always smiling, always fresh and always playing with new ideas to make new films.

Alas, he could rule from this new empire for a very short while and I sometimes feel that he had some kind of a premonition of the end. Yash Raj Studios was described as one of the best studios in the world, also the cleanest. But look at the dirty game destiny which had favoured him all the time had to play with him. Just one tiny mosquito had to sting him about which he was not even aware of, that sting was no ordinary sting. He was admitted to the Lilavati Hospital (he had a strong dislike for hospitals). A battle between life and death followed and the greatest romantic who loved life in all its colours and moods was dead...

A bronze statue of the man now stands at the gate of Yash Raj Studios to remind people of one of the all-time greats of Indian cinema. But for those who were fortunate to be close to him there is no need for a statue to remember him because he is and always will be alive for us.