OH ,THE JOY OF KILLING STARS BEFORE THEIR DEATH!

Ali Peter John

For the life of me, I have not been able to understand what sadistic, sinister,
vicarious, wicked and wild pleasure some human beings (?)derive from spreading rumours and stories about the deaths of stars ,superstars, legends and other celebrities from different worlds when they are very much alive, ruling and kicking...In all my years, I have experience this phenomenon any number of times...

In the most recent and even most horrible case it happened with Naseeruddin Shah. Irrfan Khan had died on April 29 and Rishi Kapoor had followed him just a day after, on April 30.The entire country and even people in other countries were still trying to grapple with the bitter reality when there was a strong wave of a rumour about the passing away of another great actor Naseeruddin Shah. The gossip mills and idle rumour factories were working overtime to spread this rumour as fast and wide as they could without trying to find out the truth. The reality was that Naseeruddin Shah was very much alive and active and was spending quality time with his wife, Ratna and sons Imaad and Vivaan and his actress-daughter Heeba .

When someone tried to get in touch with Naseer ,he scoffed at the story of his death and said that the vultures were at it again. There had been such wild stories being spread about him ever since he had become a target of some communal forces after he had spoken out his views on what was happening in the country. There were people within the industry and even outside it who were trying to work against him in the most wild ways they could. Even the social media was going hammer and tongs against him. Attempts made to disrupt some of his shows were nipped in the bud and there was silence on this wild front, till his detractors found a new way of attacking him and that could be the reason why they spread the rumour which grew stronger because It came in the wake of the deaths of the two other great actors. At the time of writing, Naseer is at home at Sea Pebbles and preparing for his next play .

My first experience of this kind of cowardly killings of stars was in the seventies, when I received a call from some unknown man who informed me about the" sudden death of Nutan ji ".The first call was followed by many other calls from different places,and all of them talking about the death of Nutan. It was a strange and even an eerie experience for me, but my senior, R.M.Kumtakar who knew Nutan very well called her and she was very much alive and talk to Mr.Kumtakar for ten minutes and Mr.Kumtakar did not mention anything about the rumours to her and after he had finished talking to her heaved a sigh of relief and puffed at three Berkeley cigarettes one after the other...

It was some time in the early eighties...A senior reporter, Mr.K.S.Ramkumar was desperately looking for a story to put on the front page of the "Indian Express ".He just banged the heading "Dilip Kumar to be envoy in Dubai "on his typewriter and put a question mark after the heading. He didn't have any confirmed news ,but he just wanted to create a story where there was none. He asked me for some details about Dilip Kumar to pad up his story and sent it his editor who okayed it. In what was another strange coincidence, the "Indian Express "news department was flooded with calls about the death of the "tragedy king". Luckily, I knew John Cherian who was the secretary of Dilip Kumar and he outright denied both the stories and even made me talk to the "Emperor of acting ".

Could I talk to a dead man ???

Rajesh Khanna was declared "the first superstar of India" by the media of the time and his image as a superstar was kept alive by the same media who had created him to a large extent. There was one female journalist who took all the credit of making him a superstar and it was she who kept him in the limelight with sensational stories which she planted from time to time, in consultation with Khanna. The first big story she created when Khanna was at the peak of his career and the story said that he was suffering from cancer. The headline itself made the country go into convulsions and women cried and prayed for his health while Khanna and his cronies had a grand party to celebrate the story about his being stricken by cancer. There was other stories which wrenched the hearts of his female fans, but the worst happened when the same journalist wrote about his impending death when there was no reality in the story at all. Incidentally, the journalist's headline was like a prediction for Rajesh Khanna because he ultimately fell from his throne as the superstar and finally died of cirrhosis of the liver...

These wild rumours did not even spare legends of the likes of Lata Mangeshkar, Raj Kapoor, Sivaji Ganesan of the south and most of the leading stars of the seventies and eighties...

The one story I will never forget is the story about the" death" of the most lively legend I have known, Dev Anand.I recieved a call from my photographer, Mr.R.D.Rai at four o'clock in the morning. He in a trembling voice said, "Ali Sahab, woh Dev Sahab ki death ho gayee ".I broke into tears and shattered all that was in my room,but I controlled myself and called Mr.Rai .I gave him the number of Dev Shahabs bedroom and asked him to dial the number. Mr.Rai called me in just two minutes and I could almost see him smiling in relief when he said, "woh ,Dev Sahab ne phone khud hi uthaaya aur mujhey' poocha,tum Rai ho na ,Ali ke photographer'aur maine dar ke phone rakh diya"Dev Sahab could not die so easily and just because of a stupid rumour of which he had may experiences in his long career...

Rekha was in the news for many reasons during early stages of her career, one of them was because of the men she was linked with. But ,the one story that created a sensation was when she was said to have consumed poison with her "upma"and some of the stories even said that she was dying or was dead .Rekha however was destined to live several lives in one life and she is still ruling like a queen even after forty odd years....

And if there is one man who has died several times, sometimes killed by an accident and at other times by some serious ailment,it has been Amitabh Bachchan. He was given up as a lost case by the doctors at the St.Elizabeth Hospital in Bangalore after his near fatal accident on the sets of "Coolie".He was brought to Bombay in an Air India flight, the seats of which were taken out to place his limp body on the floor of the plane. For two long months, a team of the best doctors tried to bring him back to life. And almost every third day ,there were rumours about his being dead and the rumour almost took the shape of a dark reality when the doctors gave him up as "clinically dead"on the night of August 2,1982.He was again rumoured to be dead on the morning when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi flew down to Bombay to see him at the Breach Candy Hospital .He however conquered every kind of death and came back home on August 26 to start fighting another battle to make up for all the time and opportunities he had lost. Some years later, he was rushed to the Lilavati Hospital and the rumour mill started working again to tell the world that he was dead ,but the rumor died and like Jesus Christ, he came back to life again and is now" the Star of the millennium ", a title I don't think anyone can take away from him.

And I am a no body and was always a no body, but I had my own share of being killed by rumours created by journalists who were my well-wishers and friends. It was during the riots in Bombay in 1993 that I was travelling in a bus when I received a call from my wife who started crying when she heard my voice.She had already received several calls informing her about my passing away in the riots. It was only when I reached home that she showed signs of believing that I was alive. A similar incident followed seven years later when the editor of a magazine I was working for after retiring from "Screen "called me and panicked and told me he had received several calls from journalists telling him about my death. He said he would only believe that I was alive if I went to his office immediately and showed myself to him...

But ,the closest I came to my death was when I was admitted to the Holy Spirit Hospital and my "friend "in office who I had got him his job published my obituary with the kind heading he had given without knowing what he had written, I think, "Good man gone "I had to go back to office alive to see that heading which was going to the press and the galley proof had fallen on the floor by a mistake committed by my favourite man in office, Rohidas Patil ,who knew about the heading and was embarrassed black and blue when I picked up the heading announcing my death....

I am alive, I think to tell stories like these which have never or rarely been told before. And I still don't know whether the world, the people and the media was worse than or is worse now.