Aamir Khan Birthday: When Lata Mangeshkar Heaped Praises On Aamir For Singing Aati Kya Khandala In ‘Sur’; Gifted Him An Expensive Watch-EXCLUSIVE
EXCLUSIVE: Did you know Lata Mangeshkar had gifted Aamir Khan an expensive watch after listening to the song Aati Kya Khandala. Read more interesting incidents from the Laal Singh Chaddha actor’s life on his Birthday.
I can’t deny Aamir is the most adventurous performer in India. Aamir has constantly taken risks, gone against the flow and generally been more than just a mega-star.
What’s more, I’ve always found him to be extremely true to his word. If he had ideological differences with Ram Gopal Varma and a fellow-journalist no amount of reasoning would convince him to the contrary…..if he thought popular awards were rigged, he didn’t change his mind about boycotting them even when Lagaan and Aamir won a truckload of trophies. (Incidentally, Varma and Khan disagree on everything except on the issue of awards: neither attends awards functions).
At one point in time, very long ago, I was actually close enough to Aamir to reason with him. He seemed to listen to what I had to say, though I suspect he made his own decisions independent of extraneous opinion.
Aamir was too polite to argue back. But I knew he was capable of fighting back when pushed against the wall. Here was a man who would stand by his convictions. And my admiration for these qualities spilt over into my writing….until The Image and The Man decided to part ways….
But oops, we’re jumping the gun. I got to know Aamir when he was planning Lagaan. It was the night of Diwali when the phone rang. An alien voice introduced itself. “Hi. I’m Aamir Khan…had to call because Asha Aunty asked me to.”
He was referring to my dear friend Asha Parekh, a close friend of the Khan family, whom I had asked for an introduction.
I am proud to say I introduced Aamir to the Nightingale Lata Mangeshkar. She happened to mention to me that Aamir had sung the hit Aati kya Khandala in sur. When I conveyed the compliment to Aamir he sounded genuinely zapped. I arranged for them to meet up. Lataji presented him with an expensive watch. Aamir was overwhelmed. “I’ve to find some way of repaying her kindness,” he told me, mantel-piece - proper to the end.
Later while he was shooting for Sarfarosh in Kashmir, he bought her a shawl. I never got to know if the gift reached Lataji….Aamir gradually faded out of my life.
For Lagaan, he recorded a beautiful Bhajan with her. “I get goosebumps every time I hear it,” he told me. A few months later, he re-recorded a portion of the Bhajan in another voice without Lataji’s consent and paid her a courtesy visit along with his director to inform her of the “technical necessity” for doing what he did.
I liked his straightforwardness, his artless candour, I loved the way he put every the incident in his life in perspective, dissected every dimension of his career graphically and made every professional decision appear to be matter of life and death.
I also liked the way he would defend even the indefensible films in his oeuvre, for example, the films of Indra Kumar like Dil and Ishq which, Aamir argued, were targeted at a different audience from the one that watched 1947—Earth (in my opinion, his best performance to date. Even the reprehensible Mela got Aamir’s full respect. He even defended a sequence where his boisterous character tricks a character into drinking urine.
I liked his conviction, his passion and his commitment to bettering the quality of Indian cinema, and never mind the aesthetic atrocities in his oeuvre like Pyar Pyar Pyar, Tum Mere Ho and Isi Ka Naam Zindagi.
I met him for the first time at his family residence in Bandra where at the point of time, he stayed with his wife Reena and two children. His parents stayed in another apartment in the same building. He narrated a script that he wanted to make with Sridevi in the lead.
I met his courteous wife and son and his rather-nice parents. After the meeting, I told him I was happy to have him as a friend. “How can you use the term ‘friend’ so loosely?” he harangued me. “It takes a lot of time and effort for me to become friends with someone.”
To our misfortune—or was it just mine?— our rapport never reached that stage of evolution.
I thought we shared a special rapport that went beyond the standard star-journalist equation. He never said no to me. Aamir would go out of his way to give me interviews. We both knew he was safe in my hands.
The respect remains from my end. We met many years later in his office for a possible patch up. He was warm and amiable. But we had both moved on.
Image source: SpotboyEarchives/Instagram/lata_mangeshkar
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