Today I met Legendary Manoj 'Bharat' Kumar and I forgot everything else

If I sincerely missed something precious during the painful lockdown, it was my not being able to meet this simple but very great indian who I believe in so strongly that I feel elated when I meet him and call him bharat kumar. He is perhaps the only human being whose feet I have touched without any hesitation (I wanted to touch the feet of my guru K A ABBAS when he had, but I stopped when I remembered how he disliked anyone who tried to touch his feet and had so many times pushed Raj kapoor away when he was drunk and tried to grovel around his feet in his office).

Ali peter john and Manoj Kumar

I had trying to meet Mr. Bharat Kumar when the Peak of Lockdown but...

I had been trying to meet mr bharat kumar all through the peak days of the lockdown and when I couldn't reach him, I took an auto and went to goswami towers his house in juhu where there was his huge bungalow once. And when the security guards stopped me as if I was the virus, I asked the auto driver rafiq to take a picture of me standing outside the gate of goswami towers and I was happy with my effort to reach mr bharat. There must have been at least a dozon calls I must have made, but I still couldn't succeed and satisfied myself by seeing his old black and white films and his songs with mala sinha, nanda waheeda rehman and all his other heroines big and small, songs in which he was a greater attraction than his heroines, all because of his being o so very handsome. I had seen the song, ek pyar ga nagma hai almost every day on my mobile and even when my maid made her bold attempts to sing the song.

I was first welcomed by his wife..............

I had a guest last evening in harvinder malik who was once an assistant of mahesh bhatt and now had an empire of his own. We became friends by evening and the next morning he was to meet mr bharat kumar. It was physically difficult for me to join him but the excitement of meeting mr bharat kumar pushed me and inspired me to join him and I was back to the room in which mr bharat kumar has been living in for long before the virus could strike.

The joy of meeting each other after a very long time was mutual. I was first welcomed by his wife, mrs shashi goswami who made me feel at home when she placed a plate of some very delicious sweets which made me forget that I was a diabetic and I gorged on them till mr bharat kumar called me to his room.

He called me “the last fort of good journalism"

Nothing had changed. The photograph of his parents was still where it was and so were all his books and papers and the hundreds of little bottles of tiny pills which had the homeopathic touch to cure any kind of major or minor ailments and which had cured big names like atal behari vajpayee, l k advani, murli manohar joshi and many of the stars and filmmakers. And nothing had changed about the man who the world knows' as actor, director, editor and producer of some of the most memorable films of the last fifty years.

I was on top of the world when he told mr malik that I was one of the best writers of the English language he had read and he made me touch his feet again when he called me “the last fort of good journalism". We went down several memory lanes and it turned out to be a very emotional collection of some glorious moments for both of us.

We talked about good writing, good poetry and good films and came to the same conclusion......it was not the best season for creativity to blossom and flourish

We also talked about the greats of our times and grew misty eyed when we were on a trip about the work and magic of men like dilip kumar, raj kapoor, dev anand and actresses like mala sinha, sadhana, saira banu, asha parekh and nutan and even the work of directors like guru dutt,raj khosla and the pioneers like v shantaram, b r chopra and vijay anand.

Source - Social Media

Age had taken its toll on him like it does with kings and queens, philosophers, saints and sufis, but age had failed to affect his mind. He remembered everything and everyone. He even remembered the contents of my autobiography and said that I was a very good story teller. He gave me a gist of a story he had in mind. And when he said that if I could write a story based in his idea, he would even make a comeback as a director.i may have received many compliments, but this was certainly one of the best of them and I have accepted his offer as a challenge and my best Christmas gift received from a Santa Claus who comes once in a thousand years

Incidentally, mr bharat had raised the problems of the farmers more than fifty years ago in his timely and topical film, Upkar. I wonder what this man with the heart of a farmer and the soul of a poet has to say about the farmers who are protesting and even dying in the cold to fight for their rights which they rightly deserve and should get.
.
On my way back, I could feel myself shouting “jai jawan jai kisan and could hear the entire country echoing my slogan which tells the story of the lives of the jawan and the kisaan who are the lifelines of our lives, like the poetic and philosophic meena kumari had once said in her opening lines of a programme of hindi film songs on the vividh bharti programme called jaimala a few months before she died an untimely and unfortunate death when she was only forty five years old........

Source - Youtube

A morning with me bharat kumar was worth more than a hundred meetings with men or women who are not even good enough to touch his chappals, the only footwear he loves when he is not shooting. I wish I have many more meetings full of enlightenment, encouragement and inspiration to move ahead and do something good for the country, for society, for the world and for humanity.