Ashok Kumar Birth Anniversary: I can proudly say that, I knew Dada Muni (Ashok Kumar) and…

Gossip: Mr. V. Ranganathan, the business manager of the Indian Express, was a great admirer of Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, R.D. Burman and above all Dev Anand! - Ali Peter John

By Bollyy 13 Oct 2024 in Gossip Ali Peter John

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Mr. V. Ranganathan, the business manager of the Indian Express, was a great admirer of Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, R.D. Burman, and above all Dev Anand! He was known as a man who could fix things with any powerful person, be it a Governor, Chief Minister, or leader of any party and he was very close to some of the best doctors in the city!

However, there was a time when one of his relatives from Chennai was dying of cancer and he had tried all the best doctors in Chennai and Bombay for treatment! There was no chance of his survival, but someone advised him to meet the veteran actor Ashok Kumar at least once. The man and his family came to Mumbai and Ranganathan made all the arrangements for their stay. The family told him about the purpose of their visit. Ranganathan knew that the Chief Reporter of 'Screen', Mr. R.M. Kumtakar had a very close relationship with Dadamuni, as Ashok Kumar was popular. But Mr. Kumtakar was on leave!

Meeting Dadamuni: A Newcomer's Journey to Chembur Bungalow

Mr. Ranganathan asked me if I could try to get a meeting with Dadamuni as he was still a newcomer. I did not want to take the risk of talking to him over the phone so traveled to Chembur where his huge bungalow was. I asked director Basu Chatterjee who I had come to know to talk to Dadamuni about me and the meeting was fixed for Saturday evening.

I had been watching his films from the time I first started watching films, maybe when I was five or six years old and he looked the same in real life. I found it very strange when he said that he never spoke of 'choto-choto bachche' without giving them a quiz or a riddle to solve. I had never faced a situation like that before. It was only years later that I faced the same situation with the so-called eccentric actor, Raj Kumar.

I was surprised at myself when I solved the puzzle he had challenged me with. He then asked me what he could do for me. I told him about Mr. Ranganathan, whom he knew by name. He asked me what the problem was. I told him about a cancer patient from Chennai who had great faith in his homeopathic healing powers. He asked me to bring the patient and his family to his bungalow the next day.

We all reached his bungalow travelling in Mr. Ranganathan's car. He did not waste any time and took the patient to a room and startled the patient and everyone when he laughed loudly. It was almost as if he had gone mad. He asked the patient's family if they could stay in Mumbai for a week and bring the patient to him every morning. They had no other option but to follow him. On the seventh day, Dadamuni gave the patient three small packets of very small white pills and asked him to take them regularly twice a day he also told the family that they could go back to Chennai and report to him after a week.

After getting tested through one of the best cancer specialists in Chennai they came back and they were all surprised when the reports said that the patient was almost cured. After getting tested through one of the best cancer specialists in Chennai they came back and they were all surprised when the reports said that the patient was almost cured. They couldn't believe what was happening. They had spent lakhs of rupees on the man's treatment, but nothing had happened, and here, Dadamuni had just given them a packet of white pills, and that too without charging them a single rupee.

The family came back and told the good news to Mr. Ranganathan who passed on the news to me and we decided to visit Dadamoni again the next day. He looked at us and laughed as he had done when he had seen the patient for the first time. He said, “Only three more days” and no one understood what he was saying until he clarified that they would have to see him for only three days. On the third day, Dadamoni asked them to go and get a check-up done with Dr. Luiz Fernandes at Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital in Parel! They did and Dr. Fernandes told them that the patient was cancer free. They went back to Chembur and they all fell at Dadamoni’s feet the eldest in the family said, “From today, Dadamoni, you are our God” and Dadamoni said in his humble way, “You should not call any human being God, whatever has happened is due to the magic of homeopathy which I have been practicing for years.” The patient lived for another twenty years and died, not of cancer, not even of a heart attack, but of a car accident. Dadamuni's magic with homeopathy had cured thousands of people of all kinds of ailments and he was as busy a doctor as he was an actor. He continued acting and practicing homeopathy almost till the end of his life. There were other homeopathic doctors like Manoj Kumar and the veteran actor, Raj Mehra, but for the last word, they would always approach Dadamuni.

Years passed, I met him casually and one of the incidents I remember is a scene in Cochin Shipyard where he and Dilip Kumar were shooting for one of their big films 'Duniya', directed by my friend Ramesh Talwar. We were a group of journalists who were in Cochin to cover the shooting of the film, Dadamoni asked the director to introduce all the journalists to him and make some comments against each of us. He looked at me and remembered our regular meetings during that battle with cancer. But the best part was when he was introduced to Times of India critic Khalid Mohamed. He shook Mohamed's hand and said, "You don't know how happy I am to meet you. I have been looking for you for quite some time. So, you are the person who makes me smile and brightens my Sunday." It was not meant as a compliment but was one of Dadamoni's many sarcastic comments. For in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's guest appearance in 'Guddi', which made Jaya Bhaduri a star, there was a guest appearance scene in which Hrishida involved the then superstar, Rajesh Khanna, who was supposed to cross a line, but he kept crossing the line more than he should have, both in the scene for the film and in the mock scene, Hrishida's dialogue, 'Arre bhai, Rajesh, abhi tum bahut aagar bade chhukhi ho, aur agar bade gaaye' and the scene was cut. It was a line created by Hrishida and Dadamuni to tell Rajesh Khanna how he was creating havoc with the industry after becoming a superstar. The dialogue was specially created by Dadamuni, who was probably the only Bengali who spoke Hindi and Urdu very fluently.

Years passed and Dadamuni grew old but he never stopped working even though his first big hit was a two-minute role in Boney Kapoor's 'Mr. India'. He also took to the new medium of television and was known for his role in debutant Balaji's 'Hum Paanch' and did a historical film for TV called 'Bahadur Shah Zafar'. He was close to ninety and still had the passion to keep working, but he was also falling ill regularly. When Sunil Dutt realized that he was really not well, he asked me to go to Dadamuni's place in the same Chembur house. (He also had an Ashok Kumar House in the Flora Fountain area and grew up in the real estate business which he closed down after some time.) Dutt Sahab had informed him about our visit and even though he was ill he ensured that a lunch feast was prepared for us.

It was the perfect mood and atmosphere to go into flashbacks. He spoke about those great days at Mumbai Talkies where he said he had the pleasure of working with 'one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen', Devika Rani, who was the boss of the studio where he had joined as a laboratory assistant and was forced to face the camera as the leading man of 'Achhut Kanya', marking the beginning of the longest-running career of an actor in Indian films.

He could hardly speak, but he never failed to forget the 'little boys' he saw before him. He spoke of the trio of Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar, and Raj Kapoor (like Dadamoni, who started as one of the junior assistants at Bombay Talkies before Kidra Sharma joined as an assistant and was slapped by the famous director, which was a privilege to land him as the showman of India). He had tears in his eyes when he told how the 'boys' had turned into legends as he saw them take big steps one after the other and felt proud to have been a first-hand witness to their success stories.

Whenever he had problems in breathing and speaking, he would hardly be able to breathe and used to use 'breathers' to breathe, but even in this condition, he never forgot the great directors who worked with him during his long career, big names like Bimal Roy and his assistants, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and many directors from every decade of the seventies, he worked in films.

He went through all the trouble to talk about his youngest brother, Kishore Kumar in particular. His memory was still strong enough to recall how Kishore had turned up at Bombay Talkies without informing anyone and how he was kicked out of the studio and asked to go back to Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh and 'made but determined'. How Kishore went on to become a very popular singer after initially trying to imitate the great KL Saigal. He said that he had no role in Kishore's success, on the contrary, he had given him and his brother, Anoop Kumar, their biggest hit in 'Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi' starring Madhubala in the lead role, the same Madhubala who became Kishore's wife in a marriage that was short-lived due to Madhubala's mysterious heart ailment.

He was tired and gasping for breath and his man Friday kept gesturing for us to stop, but there was little both Dutt Sahab and I could do as Dadamoni just did not want to talk. He recalled the names of some of the heroines he had worked with, especially Leela Chitnis, Madhubala, Meena Kumari, and Nalini Jaywant, with whom he did several films, but looking at Sunil Dutt, he said, there was no actress better than Nargis.

He was about to fall asleep when he said that he was very happy with the growth of the industry and then as if he had forgotten, he remembered the villain, Pran with whom he had done the biggest hit of both their careers 'Victoria 203' and how they had become very good friends and there was not a single day when they did not talk on the phone for at least two hours.

He had gone to sleep and we did not want to disturb him. Strangely, as we stepped out of his bungalow, we bumped into one of our favourite heroines Nalini Jaywant, who was also Sunil Dutt's first heroine. She did not look normal and the next thing we heard about her was that she had left her house and was not found for a few days.

We tried to meet Dadamoni again, but time played the villain and on December 10, 2001, I like the whole world got the news of his heart attack when he was in his nineties. I must confess I could not go to his funeral as I was drunk before dawn started, but many others came to bid Dadamoni a fond farewell. His funeral proved to me once again that your funeral is big, if you are big at the time of your death or else no one, not your relatives, not your friends, and certainly not the crowd of all those people whose world you have changed, because they are busy building the world you gave them and they do not have time to know that what they are doing to those who helped them rise, will happen to them too one day and then it will be too late to regret.

Isn't it strange that all the pioneers and legends of that time are dead and gone and have become a part of history but Dilip Kumar who could be called the youngest of them all is still fighting a serious battle between life and death and what is more sad and tragic is that he is not aware of the battle he is fighting.

It's a strange world sometimes, especially when you realize that you're only worth something as long as you're worth it, otherwise you're a burden and useless. Cruel world, isn't it?

An entire era belonged to Dada Muni, he was considered the Bhishma Pitamah of the film industry, and after his demise, today's generation asks, who was this Dada Moni, brother? How do these innocent ones know that one day people will ask such questions about him, it is a matter of time brother