Sheetal Jain A Witness To The Amitabh Bachchan Era Passes Away

Ali Peter John

Almost  forty years ago, Amitabh Bachchan was a young man who was better known as the son of Dr. Harivanshrai Bachchan than on his own. He had started his career as an actor, but was a failure in all his first eight or ten film. It was during this critical period in his career that he met a dashing young man called Sheetal Jain at the Ranjit Hotel in Delhi. Amitabh who was as old as the young man got to known him better and finally asked him if he would join him as his secretary to take care of his then sagging career and the enthusiastic man, Sheetal Jain who was also the uncle of the one-time actress, Anita Raaj decided to join Amitabh and came down to Bombay...

From the day Sheetal Jain joined Amitabh to this morning (June 8, 2019) Sheetal Jain was known throughout the Industry as the man closest to the man who became the star of the millennium and a great living legend. Needless to say, Sheetal Jain was with Amitabh through all his ups and downs and all his good times and bad times. If anyone could write a perfect book on all the plus points and minus points in the life and career of Amitabh, it would be Sheetal Jain, but he always considered himself as Amitabh's Man Friday and nothing more. He considered his job as a sacred duty to look after the well being of his boss...

Sheetal who had played a vital role in the gromming of Amitabh into what he ultimately became not only added glory to the name of Amitabh, but in the process also became an important man who was known among people from all circles of life.

He saw Amitabh before Zanjeer, during the success of Zanjeer and till he became the greatest ever Hindi film star. He was a witness to Amitabh's marrying Jaya and their having two children and was as close to Amitabh's parents as he was towards Amitabh. According to many, Sheetal was a discovery of Amitabh's brother, Ajitabh who is said to have trained him in dealing with people from different fields of life, but now the truth about it will not be fully known because Sheetal Jain became a part of history on the morning of Saturday.

Sheetal and me had a strange like and dislike relationship. He sometimes clearly showed that he was not very happy about my  being very close to Amitabh and was sometimes very sarcastic in his remarks. He showed how he didn't like the importance given to me by the Bachchans when Amitabh was in hospital at Breach Candy and I had gone to see him when he was getting better. He stopped me at the beginning of the staircase and said, "no, no, no, you can't go up". I expected some kind of a nasty scene till Jaya came down and saw me and saw him firing me and then leading me to Amitabh's room. I felt he would hate me all the more, but I was surprised when his attitude towards me completely changed and I could certainly call him one of my better friends.

Sheetal was also ambitious and showed it when he joined his friend Kirit Trivedi to produce a big film like Bhade Miya Chhote Miya with Amitabh and Govinda. He always had the urge to be written about in Screen, especially in my column, Ali's Notes. I was bringing out a whole issue of Screen on Amitabh a little before his 60th birthday and when I told him I wanted to interview him, he booked a room at the then Centaur Hotel where we spoke for more than two hours and he was very happy when he saw what I had written about him with his photograph with Amitabh...

Sheetal was also a lover of good Urdu poetry and sometimes even wrote poetry in Urdu and called me to his office to listen to what he had written. Javed Akhtar was his favourite poet.

He was however not a very happy man. He was always tense about his only son who was born handicapped and who he had to carry to school and couldn't do anything till he was 30. For some strange reasons, Sheetal was also a very bitter man towards the last stages of his life and if he had a couple of drinks, he could lash out at the Bachchan family and feel very bad about it the next morning.

He was in serious trouble when he met with a freak accident in his own house in Aarchana Apartments on Juhu Versova road and had fractured one of his legs, hip downwards.

It was only a day before he died that someone from Jalsa told me about his being admitted to the Nanavati Hospital and I had a very eerie feeling when I wrote out a report about his health. The next morning, I had to just switch on my mobile and the first thing that hit me in my face was the news about Sheetal going away into what I now wish is a more sheetal world than the world he lived in for 77 long years.

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