Madan Puri Saheb's Death Anniversary: A Real-Life Romantic

It was around 77. That was a period when I started feeling bound by the attraction of Bollywood. I used to bunk my engineering studies and go to the movies. I had not become a journalist then. 'Mayapuri' reporter Chhaya Mehta used to be my good friend. I have always been fond of watching films and eager to meet film people. I used to reach a fixed point to meet Chhaya and her photographer brother Deepak Mehta. The greed was that I would be able to go along with them to meet some film personality. I had gone to Natraj Studio in Andheri for one such meeting. I saw that the shooting of the big screen villain Madan Puri Sahab was going on while lying on a bed. It was an indoor shoot, the visualization was going on inside a room set up in a big hall (stage). I had already come to know by asking that there was a shoot of Rajshree Production's film 'Dulhan Wahi Jo Piya Man Bhae'. The scene being filmed was that Madan Puri Saheb was pretending to be a patient sleeping on a bed. A doctor was standing near him who was played by Iftekhar Saheb. For the first time, I was standing in front and watching a shooting. Madan Puri used to remove the oxygen mask from his mouth, look around, and then put it back on.

Now the viewers of the film can understand this sequence that how the grandfather of the film 'Dulhan Wahi Jo Piya Man Bhaye' was pretending to get his grandson to bring his daughter-in-law. When the camera was switched off, he shouted - 'Hey Tulli, where is Tulli?', 'Tulli' was a dark, medium-height girl with simple attire, who looked like a domestic girl around us. As soon as she entered the set, people started saying - 'Rameshwari has come... Rameshwari.' The heroine of this film was Rameshwari Tulli, who is now Rameshwari Seth. As soon as the shot was Okayed, Chhaya took me to meet Madan Puri Saheb. She tried to introduce me by saying ‘I am a friend’ – but Puri Saheb did not even look at me, he immediately hugged Chhaya. Chhaya had already told me that Madan Puri Sahab is her good friend. 

The on-screen and off-screen personality of an artist

There is no age restriction in Bollywood, here anyone of any age can be a friend of anyone of any age. Here no one is called 'Uncle' or 'Aunty', everyone addresses each other as 'Sir' or 'Madam' or 'Yaar'. She told me this also. Madan Puri Saheb held Chhaya Mehta's fingers and asked her to come with him to the make-up room. By now lunch break had also been announced. After a while, everything was wonderful to me.

I was eating dinner with the star whom I used to watch as a goon on screen, sitting across the table from him! Needless to say, the bug of becoming a film journalist must have been stirred in me from here. Madan Puri Saheb said that this film will wash away his image of 'Gunda', 'Badmash', 'Smuggler', and 'Khalnayak'. The hero in this film was Prem Kishan, son of Premnath. Puri sahib told us that the role he was doing was initially to be done by Premnath. But he has taken the opportunity to become a Sharif from Manoj Kumar's film.

That's why the experiment of making Sharif from this film has happened to me. Chhaya Mehta had gone to that set not on the invitation of the press but on the invitation of Madan Puri. Madan ji had very lovingly asked Chhaya - 'I don't know whether people will accept me after seeing me in the role of a respectable man (in the role of grandfather) or not?' He used to hit Chhaya repeatedly on the shoulder.

The thought that came to my mind at that time was that this old man was such a jerk and it took me a while to understand that showing such fake intimacy is a trend in the film industry. Then we went to shoot this film several times on different days and at different locations. We used to sit in the make-up room of Madan Puri. After Puri Saheb's arrival, the conversation was very funny and the topic of conversation was light romance. Many times, like me, the film's heroine Rameshwari also used to express her views and say that people of this line consider themselves very young and romantic. Many times when Madan Ji met us on the sets of his other films, his style was very cheerful and funny, especially when he was among women. This was the nature of that villain in his personal life who appeared very tough on screen. I had seen two forms of an artist - one of which was the image of the curtain and the other was completely different... which were in the make-up room.

-Sharad Rai

Tags : death-anniversary

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