PRIYA TENDULKAR: VOH MOHABBAT KARTI RAHI, HUM UNKO JAAN SE ZYAADA MOHABBAT KARTE RAHE, HUMNE UNSE KAHA WOH GALAT RAAH PE JAA RAHI HAI, WOH PHIR BHI MOHABBAT KARTI RAHI AUR BARBAAD HO GAYI.

- ALI PETER JOHN
Overlooking anything to find the unusual has been a childhood habit with me. I have been finding the most unusual news and titbits in the most unexpected places. I onc even kicked a piece of dirty paper lying on the ground to see one of my articles being kicked around by hundreds of people who walked up and down the lane leading to my house.... I can go on and on about such things happening in my life.

It was September 19, 2002 and I was travelling by a BEST bus to a place called Hutatma Chowk which had just been named by that name and which was and is still known as Flora fountain. I overlooked the evening news of India which was a prominent afternoon paper brought out by the Times of India group and was shocked ro see the news of the death of my dlvery dear friend Priya Tendulakra, the popular actress of marathi and hindi theatre , films and television and one of the first TV celebrities and writers. She was only 47 years old and had achieved more than what people double and more ger age could not even dream of achieving and as I drove in that BEST bus , I thought about her colourful, sometimes controversial and her very popular life especially among the women and families of middle classes.

Priya Tendulkar was the second daughter of Vijay Tendulkar, one of the most outstanding marathi playwrites who had written some of the most outstanding and controversial plays and who was a major celebrity in the world of Indian literature. Priya studied in a marathi medium school in the suburb of Vile Parle where she also lived in a building called Badri Dham with her family. She was perhaps one of the first girls from the marathi middle class who joined a five star hotel as a stewardess and quit the job within a week when she came to know about the underhand dealings going on between her seniors and the male customers of the restaurant she was working in. She next joined Air India as an air hostess and found the same kind of corrupt practices, especially when it comes to young women and their bosses and even quit this very well- paying job and took to writing short stories for Marathi newspapers and within a very short time she was known as a very good writer and won the awards of the government of Maharashtra for the best writer three times in a row. It was Shyam Benegal who recognized her talent as an actress and gave her a small but very significant break in Ankur which had Shabana Azmi in the lead role , but Priya could make a mark even with that small role and she was soon flooded with offers to act in marathi, hindi , kannada and gujrati films. She was all set to be a star when she made her first big mistake when she agreed to play the mother of Anil Kapoor , Jacky Shroff and Shahrukh Khan in Subhash Ghai's Trimurti which turned out to be a disaster and affected Priya's career as an actress very badly.

She had however shot to fame even before she could do Trimurti when she was chosen to play Rajni in the serial of the same name directed by Basu Chatterji. She became such a household name with this serial that even that then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi called her and her family to have breakfast with him at his residence in New Delhi.

It was while she was basking in the success of Rajni that she and her father joined hands to start one of the first reality shows on television titled the Priya Tendulakar show which became instantly popular. She followed it with other popular reality shows which were written and directed by her among besides anchoring the shows. But in between all these creative and hectic activities , she found time to fall in love with Karan Razdan who played her husband in Rajni. They were poles apart in their personal lives , but I still don't know what brought them so close that day even decided to get married. I was now a very close and trusted friend of the Tendulkar family and I don't know why till the last evening in the last moment I kept telling Priya that she was not making the right choice ( I also knew Karan very well ). But they got married and there began a new and rather ugly life for Priya who could have got everything she wanted ( Rajiv Gandhi had even offered her a ticket from the Congress party to contest the elections from the North Bombay West Constituency, but she turned it down when she realized that the veteran actor and Congress leader Sunil Dutt was also in the fray).

I soon saw the cracks in the marriage when they travelled in different cars and tried to put up a show living a happy married life, but I also knew how Priya used to called me home every morning and over a cup of coffee tell me how miserable life was getting after her marriage. I was always flabbergasted by the one sentence she kept repeating every morning in which she said," Main toh baanjh hoon aur baanjh hi maroongi".

She was in her early forties when she was first diagnosed for cancer. She didn't want to die because she knew that her family which included her powerful father dependent on her for everything. She kept working in as many serials as she received, the best being Hum Paanch in which she appeared only as a talking photograph in a frame. Her marriage was failing. Her family was crumbling. Her strong father was a victim of Parkinsons. Her loving mother was struck by Amnesia and was in bed for years, Her only brother Raju who was a brilliant cinematographer and her elder sister Sushma both died of alcoholism and finally her parents too died. I have read , seen and heard of many such eerie stories in my life, but this is one story of one family which makes me sit up and wonder about what this whole game of life is all about and why God or whoever is that power who runs this world in such a nasty way with some good people and how he smiles and lookes away when some bad , very bad and wild get away very easily even after committing the most gruesome crimes.

AE KHUDA TU KAB BATAAEGA KI TERE MANN MEIN KYA HAI AUR TU KAB NYAAY KAREGA INSAANON SE ?