Dear Jindagi, Alia ko dunia ke liye tofa Dene ke liye shukriya...BY Ali Peter John

Life is nothing but a short list of ifs and buts - ALI PETER JOHN

My mother was dying in a municipal hospital and I who was 14 years old knew nothing about the seriousness of death and sat outside the ward and saw a flickering bulb and kept hoping that all would be well with my mother and I would take her home and we could start a new life, but that was not to be, because she died the same morning and I knew the finality of death when a ward boy dressed in dirty white and a Gandhi cap( what was the connection between Gandhi and death, i wondered) and he covered my mother's body with an equally dirty white sheet and said,"Ye to gayi, body lene ke liye parso aana".

I took the badly cut and stitched up mother home and buried her in a grave marked out for the poor and that was the beginning of my long struggle through life which included many ups and downs and several storms.

But when I look back now on my first 14 years with my mother I realise that I learned more from her than from all the schools I went to, all the colleges I wrecked my brain in, all the second hand books I waded through and all the foggy teachers I tolerated.

It was my mother who was windowed when she was 35 who single-handedly brought up her three sons which included me.

If she had lived a little longer I would have perhaps owned half of Mumbai and married all the beautiful girls...

Why am I remembering my mother so much? It is because I am about to tell you a story about another mother who was a single mother even though she was married and has brought up her daughters in the best way possible and one of daughter is Alia Bhatt who was last week officially crowned the number one actress of Bollywood because of the grand commerical and critical success of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's "Gangubai Katiawadi". Her other sister is Shaheen and she has nothing to do with films till now.

Mahesh Bhatt had gone through a series of storms in his life. He was a player in a local band. He turned an hopeless alcoholic. He joined the well known director Raj khosla as an assistant and finally made films like "Manjile aur bhi hai" and "Vishwasaghaat" and broke new grounds with films like "aarth" and "Saraansh".

It was during the making of Saransh that Mahesh had an affair with his young actress, Soni rajdan and gave up his first wife Kiran and their children Pooja and Rahul and converted to Islam and married Soni who gave up her career for him and ended up being the mother of his two daughters, Shaheen and Alia.

But Mahesh was still on his own trip with spiritual gurus like Bhagwan rajneesh and UG Krishnamurti.

He kept making films but his heart was not in them and he had another roaring affair with Parveen Babi which ended in a gruesome tragedy when Parveen's body was found in a decomposed state and under mysterious circumstances.

It was during this time that Soni rajdan (she refused to change her surname) brought up her two daughters and paid greater attention to Alia who showed signs of being an actress and a painter at a very early age and Soni encouraged her, while Mahesh just neglected her and her sister.

When he was once asked why he didn't do anything for Alia, he is supposed to have said, "Nowadays I don't go to the studios to work, I only go for the food".

Soni's encouragement lead Alia to play her first role as a child artist in Sangharsh and her first chance to play a lead role came when she lost 18 kilos of her baby fat and appeared for an audition for Karan Johar and she was selected as one of the students in "Student of the year" which also marked the debut of Varun Dhawan and Sidharth Malhotra... And not much really happened to Varun and Sidharth, but the Bhatt's daughter zoomed to Stardum with one film after the other, films like "Two states", "Highway", "Dear Zindagi", "Gullyboy", "Raazi".

Her role as Sehmat Khan proved that she could really and the roles she was offered in films like "Gangubai Katiawadi", "Bhramastra", "RRR" , "Raja aur Rani ki prem kahani" and now "Zara sa ji le" have taken her to a pinnacle far above all the other actresses in the big game to the top.

And with Gangubai, she has written a kind of climax to her own success story which cannot be easily surpassed by any of the other actresses around.

Alia is the true representative of the stars of the new generation. She has her own business interests, she has her own production company and she makes tons of money by participating in big shows with big stars all over the world.

Her star value today is like it has never been for any other actress of any other time. In fact, in the market they have already started calling her "The only hero in the business" .

Alia has had other affairs in the past, but it will only be right to say that she has been true to her steady affair with Ranbir Kapoor who fell for her after he had fallen out with his co-stars like Deepika Padukone and Katrina Kaif.

She and Ranbir have been planning to Tie the knot for the last three years and their marriage also had the blessings of their parents, but the pandemic ruined their plans. In fact, it was the late Rishi Kapoor's last wish to see Ranbir and Alia married before he died.

The lovers have already bought their dream house in Bandra, close to where Neetu Kapoor lives and are only waiting for the pandits to fix a proper date on which they can take the Sath pheras and then walk into the waiting sunset which will lead them to a new sunrise which will lead them to many more bright sunrises and glowing and golden sunsets.