MAIN JANAB KADER KHAN KA GUNHEGAAR HOON - Ali Peter John

I was on the same flight as Kader Khan and we were heading for the Begumpet Airport, Hyderabad where he sometimes flew three times in a day as he was not only the most successful dialogue writer and a popular comedian and comic - villain in almost every film that was being made in Hindi.

I was not very close to him, but we were friends who knew each other for long, ever since he had written the dialogue for the films of Manmohan Desai and Prakash Mehra and for other films made with Amitabh Bachchan. On the flight, I asked him why he wrote such pedestrian lines and why he played atrocious roles in bad films which were the Hindi remakes of successful Telugu films and his instant answer was , " bete , tumne gareebi ki shakal kabhi dekhi hai ? Tumne Kamathipura ka  naam suna hai ? " I had seen the face of gareebi very closely as I was a gareeb brought up by my gareeb mother and I had seen Kamathipura because I had friends who lived in the Dongri and Khetwadi areas of South Bombay . My answer must have struck a chord in him because during  the rest of the flight he told me the brief story of his early life and told me how his family had come from the  interiors of Afghanistan and how because they were very poor , they had to live in the Kamathipura area which was known as the red light area of Bombay . He also told about how his mother encouraged him to study and how her two words , " "tu padh" had changed his life , how he went to college and how he ended up as a professor of engineering at a prominent Muslim educational institute and how he had developed a love for Urdu and Hindi theatre and how he worked hard to make a few hundred rupees . He was in a mood to go on with his story , but the flight landed and we promised each other to catch up with our talk at the Banjara Hotel where we were alloted suites by the leading producer , Dr D Rama Naidu . But that meeting did not happen during this trip and for several trips after .

He once met me at the same Banjara Hotel and said , " Ali Sahab, aap bade bade logo ke baare mein likhte hai , kabhi iss nacheez ke baare mein bhi kuch likhye" . I have rarely felt so small like I did on that evening . But I made up my mind that I would write about  him some day soon .....

But I kept doing my "research" about him and the result of my "research"  was that I came to know a man who was hiding his multi - coloured achievements under the guise of a buffoon which were the characters he played most and a writer who was far away from the scholarly and philosophical writer and thinker he was .

It was after I completed my serious research that I met him at the same Banjara once again and he told me interesting anecdotes about his career, about how he had written the dailogue of his first film , "Jawani Diwaani" sitting at the Oval Maidan in Bombay in just a few hours and how he was paid a few hundred rupees for it , about how Dilip Kumar had seen one of his plays and had offered him roles in his films like" Sagina" and "Bairaag" and how Dilip Kumar was his ideal actor like almost every actor who wanted to be a good actor , about how the director of "Jawani Diwaani" Narender Bedi had found him under the staircase of an old building and had paid him 500 rupees to write the dialogue for his film , "Benaam" .which was his original passport to enter the world of hindi films .

We had met several times at Banjara , but we had to still wait for that long talk we had planned to have because he was busy as busy can be and I could stay in Hyderabad only for a day or two and then fly to good old Bombay without which there was no home and no life .

I often wondered how this Khan could write the dialogue of so many films at the same time and I found my answer when I saw him writing dialogue on pieces of paper and flight tickets and fly his dialogue through his assistant Jamshed to all the places where films with his dialogue were being shot. For the films made in the South , he was asked to stick to the dialogue written in the original , but he succeeded in giving the dialogue his own touch . I still find it difficult to imagine that he wrote the dialogue for more than 300 films and acted in an equal number .

This Khan must have been a genius lost in a world where mediocrity was king which I think his one of the major tragedies .

He spoke about directing films that were of his liking . During the beginning of his career , he had written a film called "Shama" which was a film in a class of its own and he wanted to make similar or better films.

It was this passion to make his own class of films that made him write a very different script keeping in mind a superstar in whose career he had played a crucial part. He wanted to also produce and direct the film which he wanted to call "Jaahil". The superstar gladly agreed to do the film, but kept postponing the date of the launch which frustrated the great Kadar Khan for the first time. He kept falling sick and cut down drastically on his writing and acting assignments. He opened his own shopping mall in Holland with his son , but this adventure also failed. He then changed tracks completely and took to talks about the poetry of Mirza Ghalib and was very successful . But he fell a prey to a mysterious ailments of the muscles and nerves . He kept his promise made to himself to go on a pilgrimage to Haj where he looked very sick and soon , the man called Kadar Khan who was a household name left all his name and fame behind and was not even fortunate to be burried in the soil of the land to which he had given so much and who was given much more by the land called India about which he had written so much in his films and plays .

 AISA KYON HOTA HAI . ? EK INSAAN ZINDAGI KO ITNA KUCH DETA HAI, AUR PHIR ZINDAGI USSE SAB KUCH CHHEEN LETA HAI