YE TASVEERE SAABIT KARTI HAI KI DEV SAHAB CHALE GAYE , LEKIN MERA DIL HAI KI AAJ TAK MAANTA NAHI ......... By Ali Peter John

It was December 3, 2011 and Goa was celebrating the birth anniversary of the patron saint of Goa St. Francis Zavier, when the news of the death of eternal Dev Anand caused a stir, not only in Goa and all over India but also in the different parts of the world, Dev Anand had a very close association with - Ali Peter John  

There was a long wait for the body of the man loved by millions for more than sixty years, but there seemed to be no hope that happening for reasons best known to his son Suniel and some of his friends from London and in London.

I still shudder to think of the ever so excited Dev lying as a corpse with a thorough post mortem conducted on his body, which was worshipped by so many. He had died in his suite at the Washington Mayfair Hotel in London.

His body was finally released and on the advise of Suniel it was decided to have a Christian mass said by a Vicar at the Putney Vale Crematorium, South London. The Hindu rites were also to be performed by a local Pandit.

There were just a few mourners, a scene Dev Sahab, a man who loved solitude would have loved even in death.

Among those who were present at the last rites at the crematorium were members from the Indian High Commission, Lord Karan Bilimoria, Kartar Lalwani and Saharashri Subroto Roy who happened to in London at that time and Raja Kaasheff who remembered the many hours he has spent with the tiimeless man called Dev.

The cortege had finally reached the crematorium. Some obituary references were made to Dev, who they could hardly do any justice to.

The coffin made in high quality wood was placed on the pedestal which took the coffin to a room where it was reduced to ashes by the electric crematorium and Dev Sahab had grown eternal again.

Dev towards the end of his life questioned the existence of God and heaven or hell.

He said a man just gets born, works and passes away and there is no proof about what happens to a man after he is dead.

He once said that he believes that there was a God within every human being and it would be better to believe in oneself than to believe in a God who nobody has seen and ideas like heaven and hell which also have no proof of such places being there.

He once even said that there was a possibility of something better than life happening to man after death.

I hope this belief of Dev Sahab comes true for him if not for anyone else. I firmly believe that a man like Dev and my Guru K. A. Abbas who once gave shelter to Dev and later even cast him in his film " Rahi ", can never die, they are always alive because their thoughts and beliefs are always endless and eternal.