TUM SHAYAD BHUL SAKTE HO BADSHAAH KHAN , LEKIN MEIN KAISE BHUL SAKTA HU KI TUMNE MUJHE NAYEE ZINDAGI DI HAI ? BY ALI PETER JOHN

I don't know how long I will remember my birthday(and I am very fond of remembering them and celebrating them with the excitement of a child), but I know for sure that I will remember my birthday of my second life, literally, till the end of the days of my life and a great part played by Shah Rukh Khan who is also known as Badshah Khan and the king of romance, in films strictly because he has not given anyone a chance of talking about his having any other affair with women during the last twenty-seven years in this industry where affairs, making and breaking up are a way of life - ALI PETER JOHN

It is his birthday and I am writing this piece as my tribute to the Badshah and his Badshah at of his empire which is his heart which has a place for millions at any given time.

On November 19, 2016. I am on my small walk which is also my form of praying and a time when I get some of my best thoughts.

I remember the advice given to me by my friend, Grace who had once saved me from an accident which could be the end of my life and she had asked me to look all around and then cross the road and I followed her advice on that morning too.

I cross the road successfully, but I stop to pick up some fallen flowers which is also my every day habit, now grown into a part of my prayer.

I try to stand up after clutching the delicate white flowers, when I find myself cruelly knocked out by a water tanker.

I have a feeling that I am dead, but fell alive when I see the queue outside the bank of India, all of them scared victims of Modi's “notebandi”.

A part of the crowd come rushing to help me, but the damage has been done. The tanker crushes my entire left foot.

I try to stand on one leg and collapse when I see a little but rapidly flowing river of blood flowing on the road.

Three men rush me into a reluctant auto driver's vehicle and take me to the Kalsekar hospital where I have not seen any patient for years, it is like a haunted house and one man standing at the gate tells the people with me not to waste time there and take me to the Cooper Hospital and I am pushed into the ICU and placed between two dead bodies and my foot put into a plaster without any attention paid to my profusely bleeding wound.

I surrender and close my eyes till I see my brother-in-law Sudhir who comes as a savior and within minutes an ambulance carries me to the one-time well-known Nanavati hospital.

It takes a team of several junior doctors to rip off the first plaster and put my foot into another plaster and move me to Ward no.9, Bed no.20 where I am destined to live and die several times during the next four months.

As I lie in bed, I wonder from where the money would come for the treatment. The same evening my foot goes through a five hours long operation under Dr. A.R. Karkhanis and am surprised to find myself alive the next morning, but with a massive plaster and scary looking spikes protruding from within the plaster.

The pain doesn't worry me so much as the money that would have to be arranged and I didn't have any at around noon I received the kind of news that only god could bring, the message had come from the Badshah, Shah Rukh khan.

It said that all the expenses for my treatment as long as I was in hospital would be borne by the Shah Rukh Khan trust. from that moment, I went through nine major surgeries.

A major plastic surgery, several blood transfusions, every kind of injection, test and experiments were made on my body and I became a VIP patient in the ward and my foot became a museum piece for all the doctors, nurses and visitors.

I realised that the bill must have gone very high and I expressed my fear and insecurity to Ms. Karuna Badwal, the manager of SRK and she just said, “Don't worry, Ali, you just take care of yourself”.

I heaved a huge sigh of relief and I wondered who there could be a man like SRK who could give till it hurt “the message of Saint Teresa who has a special place in the Nanavati Hospital”.

The evening I was carried out of Ward no.9, I didn't have to ask what my bill was and no one asked me any questions.

The Badshah had given me a feeling of being a Badshah, so what if I was a Badshah with only one foot!

On his birthday, I wish I could like Rajesh Khanna tells his sister in the memorable film "Anand", "Kaash main yeh keh sakta ki meri umar tujhe lag jaaye", say the same to SRK.

Whatever my story is I will tell the truth to the whole world, whether Badshah Khan feels embarrassed about it or not and whether he likes it or not.

Where do we find men like him in a world where men and women pass by the suffering and mumble, "so sad, so bad” and move on…?

3 years later, my foot still gives me pain, but when I think about the gesture of the Badshah, the pain gets less and sometimes even vanishes.