Did Amitabh Bachchan Work Miracles In His Heydays?

Ali Peter John

I had first heard about and read about miracles when I was in school and a firm believer in Jesus Christ, because my mother taught me to believe in him. I believed in all the miracles he worked like changing water into wine at his mother's request at her friend's son's wedding like his raising his friend Lazarus from the dead, like his curing lepers and other sick people on the spot and making the blind see and the deaf hear and the lame walk and above all his walking on the sea. I had stopped believing in all these miracles once my mother died and the priest who prayed over her dead body asked me to pay him 15 rupees to sing his prayers which he said would be a guarantee for my mother to find a place in heaven. I can go on and on about the men and their miracles in my life, but I must say that if I had any hope of reviving my belief in miracles, it came to a crushing end when a certain hatha Yogi made headlines by claiming that he could walk on water and drowned the moment he stepped on water and a certain Sathya Sai Baba who had a moped of curly hair and used more makeup than any film heroine claimed to bring out wristwatches and refrigerators from thin air and showed that he could, but only before his rich and powerful devotees, had jumped out of his window and run away when a petty thief entered his room....

Talking about men who worked or who couldn't work miracles, reminds me of my friend (I hope he doesn't feel offended calling him my friend) Amitabh Bachchan. I can always claim that I was a witness to his signing his first film, “Saat Hindustani", made by his mentor and my mentor, K A Abbas..

I was also a witness to his unprecedented rise to the kind of stardom no other star, not even Rajesh Khanna had reached. It was during the time when he had reached the highest peaks of success that he gave me reasons to believe or at least to wonder if he could work miracles....

The first time it happened when the supervisor of the printing press of The Indian express, Mani came to me in a state of panic. He said his only son, Shiva was dying of a fever which no doctors in Bombay could diagnose or find a cure for. Mani went on to say that his son, Shiva only took the name of Amitabh Bachchan whenever he came to his senses and told him in Tamil that he was very sure that he would be cured if he saw Amitabh bacchan once. Mani told me that he would be very grateful to me if I could take him and his son wherever Amitabh would call them. I spoke to Amitabh and he asked me to bring him with his son to the film city where he was shooting (he was doing three shifts in a day those days). We reached Film City and we could see how Mani and his son were behaving as if they were approaching a temple to pray before their family deity. Amitabh did not make them wait for even a few minutes and told Mani that he would only bless his son like he would bless his own son and that he should not expect any miracles or wonders from him. The moment the little boy saw Amitabh his eyes which his father said were always drowsy opened up and he couldn't believe that he was in the presence of Amitabh himself. He suddenly came back to life and started running towards Amitabh who patted him on his back and said, “jaldi thik ho jao, bete". Mani was over the clouds and made attempts to to touch Amitabh's feet, which of course Amitabh didn't let him do. On our way back, the father and son were so visibly excited that they didn't look like just they had recently faced a major crisis. The next day, Mani called me to say that he and his son together with his wife were leaving for their native place in Chennai and informed me that the fever has left his son, Shiva completely.

My friend, Robert called me up from Saudi Arabia and told me about a very unusual story. His friend had just got married, but the bride had refused to talk to the bridegroom or anyone else and she had a condition that she would talk only if she saw Amitabh Bachchan and met him. My friend asked me if I could arrange a meeting, I did. The couple flew to Bombay the next day. The same evening Amitabh called us to ‘Prateeksha'. The couple was sitting in total awe. Amitabh came down in his then normal attire of a white kurta and pajama and and straight away started a conversation with the bride, who kept blushing and looking at Amitabh in sheer disbelief. Amitabh made her totally comfortable and she agreed to break her silence and talk.... And what a way she talked. She never stopped talking till she took the flight back to Saudi with her husband who had made her dream come true.

A young man from Indonesia was not willing to get married till he saw Amitabh. His brother, Ishaan who was a struggling actor asked me if I could do something. I could only because of Amitabh's kindness. The brother took the first flight to Bombay and the meeting was arranged and by midnight he had told his parents in Jaipur that he was willing to marry any girl of their choice. For the reception, the family had taken over an entire hotel in the heart of the city of Jaipur and every room, restaurant, the menu and the names of the drinks in the bar were named after the films or the songs or the characters played by Amitabh. I had never seen such madness before, but the bride grooms said it was his way of showing his devotion to his ‘god'.

At around the same time, the young man called Anil Jadhav landed in Bombay from Belgaum. I don't know how he found me, but by evening I was sitting with him in Amitabh's ABCL office at Ajanta Hotel in Juhu. He went back as a mad man and for the next few days he had his photograph with Amitabh splashed in every newspaper in Belgaum. He too had vowed to get married only after seeing Amitabh. He got married. He has two sons, the first called Amit and the second called Sumit and the whole family are ardent devotees of Amitabh Bachchan around whom their whole world revolves. As I write this piece, I know that crowd outside Jalsa keeps growing on the Saturday evening festival for worshippers of Amitabh, three or four generations of whom have been coming here for the last 40 years with the same dedication. The crowd will grow bigger tomorrow, Sunday and if Amitabh is in Mumbai, he will make sure that he will come out to his gate and waive out to the people who he always says are the people who made him what he is today. And I have been watching him since the time when there never used to be a body or a soul outside his gate still wonder whether he still works miracle or whether he himself is one of the greatest miracles of our times.