Tom Alter Was Inspired To Play The Early Life Of Ali Peter John

Ali Peter John

Tom was in his late sixties, but was as active as any of the best young cricketers (next to films and theatre, Tom loved cricket and was an encyclopaedia about the game). He was the first to interview Bharat Ratna Sachin Tendulkar when he was only fifteen year old and had predicted a great future for him. He was also an ardent fan of Sunil Gavaskar who he said was now only remembered as a cricket commentator and not so much as ‘the little master who beat the daylights out of the then powerful West Indian team whose pace bowlers he played against without wearing a helmet and helped India won the first series against West Indies in West Indies.

 He was as or more active than Amitabh Bachchan. He never liked being inactive and so kept doing one-man shows in which he played all the important historical characters like Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Kabir, Sahir Ludhianvi and many others. Theatre came to him naturally, he was born to act....

It was during the shooting of his first film as a director that he hurt one of his fingers. Like the typical player who kept playing inspite of small injuries, he continued with the shooting during the day and did his most difficult plays in the evening. His passion for theatre was so intense that he even performed Maulana Azad in an apartment in Pune at my request and more than anything else, he read my autobiography in Hindi“Zindagi Tukdo Mein"(Life--Bits and Pieces) and said that he just had to do a one act play based on my life. He was so carried away by my story which he had not known even after knowing me for than forty years that he booked the MET auditorium in Bandra and arranged for snacks for all the guests all at his own expense. His doing a play on my life gave me what I now think is the only opportunity to have hoardings put up in the most prominent places with my face being the only one on them and his name only  mentioned as the director and actor of the play.....

He had read my autobiography in Hindi titled ‘Zindagi Tukdo Mein' while he was in Khajuraho and told me he just had to do the play based on my early life. He was a perfectionist and wanted to go into the village and the jungle where I had spent my childhood and early days. He had his tea at the same little hotel where I used to have my tea in those days. He had a very good look at my house which was still there with only its name changed from M. Ali House, a name I had given it in honour of my mother which was thrown away and replaced by those three words, ‘Jai Shri Ram'. He spoke to some of the old villagers who had seen me grow as ‘Mary aunty ka ladka'. It was only when he was satisfied did all his homework that he was ready to do the play.

He continued working as if his finger had not been hurt seriously at all. He started every show with a bandage around that injured finger and carried on...

It was while he was doing one of his plays in Bangalore that he first realised the seriousness of the injury. The doctors in Bangalore said he had neglected the finger for too long and gangrene had set in and the only way to save himself was to amputate his finger and he let them do it, but he never stopped working....

Matters took a turn for the worse when the doctors at the Saifee Hospital at Charni Road which was close to his house diagnosed that the cancer from the finger had spread to his arm-pits and had traveled to his lungs....

He fought a brave battle against the most painful kind of cancer and finally succumbed to it. He will always be remembered as the boy from Dehradun who made it big, but could have made it bigger if he was not known to be an Englishman or an American when the basic fact was that he was very much an Indian who could speak English better than any of the learned English men or women and he could put poets, writers and scholars of Hindi, Urdu and even Persian into the background with his command over these languages......

This industry has the very bad habit of branding even some of the best of actors and Tom Alter who could give the best of them a run for their money was the worst victim of this bad habit...

But who can forget some of the roles he played in films and how can he be forgotten for some of the most significant plays done by one man who had the power of keeping the stage active and alive week his performances and the way he used language as a weapon to win any kind of“war".

Let Tom Alter not be forgotten because of there is an attempt to forget him, there are all his films and all his plays ready to stand up as one man to defend him.

PS-Tom never used footwear and walked barefeet under any conditions and any circumstances. He always wore a white khadi pyjama and matching kurta and a scarf around his neck. He never bought a car, but always travelled by a taxi which he never changed (not even the driver) for forty years.

He was of the opinion that the younger generation had made it a fad to forget all the great leaders of India, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi and that could have been one of the reasons why he played characters from history and great literature in the plays he did in which he spoke the kind of Hindi and Urdu that could put pandits and shaayaars into the shade. He believed in keeping himself busy all the time without thinking about the materialistic things of life. His prayer meeting at a very ago church on Cumballa Hills was like a celebration of his life with celebrities of all religions and all communities came together to remember him, more than to pray for him as I felt during the hour-long service in English. And I who could hardly walk had gone up to pay my tributes to a man who was so very different from the thousands of men I have met in this life. We had many things in common and we were also born in the same year (1950) and in the same month (June), but he had beaten me by one week when he came into this world on June 22 and I followed him exactly a week later, on June 29.

This morning I was watching what was perhaps his last interview on Doordarshan and while he was speaking his heart out, I kept looking at that fateful finger which looked so innocent and even like a piece of decoration, which was ultimately going to claim a very precious life which would never happen again.

TOM ALTER’S OPINION ABOUT APJ

In my 41 years in the Hindi film industry --- not Bollywood, but the Hindi film industry – I have been blessed and cursed to meet every sort of person this universe could ever produce – one day I will sit down and tell about the Big Three (Dilip, Raj, and Dev), who were true blessings, to the frauds and farces who also abound – and many in between – but today, on a humid, sweaty Mumbai afternoon, I want to write about a man who breaks all conventions, even of an industry like the film industry.

Ali Peter John – an imp with a heart of gold – a journalist who writes about the truths of life – a man who knows Bombay, even Mumbai, as he knows the veins in his wrists and in his heart – of all the journalists I have met in these 41 years, Ali is the most unique – when you meet him, you feel as if he is actually listening to you, as if he actually cares about you and your career – and when he speaks of himself, it is not his ego speaking, but his experience, his journey –

Ali has been with Screen magazine for decades – he has seen and written about it all – the comings and the goings, the rise and fall, the dream and the reality – from Rajesh Khanna to Amitabh to Shahrukh – he has felt their pride and their pain – deeply – and written of it – and them – and many more – with deep insight and sensitivity.

Ali and I meet about every ten years – at some function, or some muhurat, or some premiere. Each time there is that impish smile, that tilt of the head and of the heart – those probing and yet loving eyes – a question or two, a tale or two, and we bid adieu for another ten years.

Very recently, I met him at Khajuraho during a film festival, in which a film, “Alex Hindustani’, was being screened – a film in which I had the pleasure of acting with my son, a film which is still wending its way to release, a film of immense potential, but a film, like so many others, which is struggling to reach its final destination – the cinema halls of our great country.

It was a perfect time and place to meet Ali – for he understand the film’s journey as few others could, and also because, even more importantly, he gave me a copy of his book – “Zindagi Tukdon Mein” – “Life in Fragments” – which is the tale, told in Hindustani, of Ali’s name and his father and his mother and his Bombay and his brother and his struggle and his problems and his victories and K.A. Abbas and – above all – an ode to the city where Ali was born and still lives and works and where he will, surely, one day, as we all must, drift away –

The fragments that he writes of are uniquely Ali’s – like his name – but they are also fragments of truth, of courage, of pain and hate, of prejudice and injustice, of poverty and poetry, of people and places.

For more Bollywood updates, follow Bollyy!

Tags: Bollywood, Bollywood News, Bollywood Updates, Television, Telly News, Tom Alter, Ali Peter John, Tom Alter Biography