Months before he passed away in July 2012, Rajesh Khanna managed a rare self-deprecatory turn in a lifetime of ego trips. In what was apparently the first time he was appearing in a commercial (he’d done print ads in his heyday), and what was also claimed to be the first time he was turning out in a tuxedo on camera, he decided to laugh at himself, insisting no one could take away his legion of fans from him, as the camera panned to a stadium-full of rotating blades. Perhaps it was his last sally at overturning years of oblivion for ‘Kaka’, as his legion of real fans called him, and the ad sure made a splash, especially after it proved to be his last celluloid offering. The abiding memory of it, however, is one of pathos, of being forced to see the shrivelled caricature of a man slipping away on account of terminal liver cancer. The gaunt face, the sunken eyes and the broken voice were a far cry from the splendid jawline, the impish eyes and the rich baritone of the romantic hero who became India’s first superstar and introduced a whole generation of girls to the art of writing letters in blood and kissing car bonnets.
Keeping the personal personal
While the jury is still out on whether the makers of the ad film ‘used’ a dying Kaka and if the ad itself was disparaging to his legacy, fact is that the actor willingly partook in the project. Such informed consent doesn’t seem to have been the case with his peer and ailing yesteryear star Vinod Khanna as social media went hysterical with an image of him in hospital clothes last week. Flanked by his wife and son, Khanna looked virtually unrecognisable in his frail arms, scraggly grey stubble and barely open eyes. It led to feverish speculation about him suffering from bladder cancer, even as the hospital’s official version had it that he was admitted for extreme dehydration. Khanna is much better now, his family has subsequently reported, but this image of him as a pale shadow of the man who was too good-looking to keep playing villain will remain etched in the mind, much like that of an Amitabh Bachchan outside a Delhi hospital a few years ago inside an SUV, slouching from abdominal pain.
That the personal is anything but personal for celebrities and those in the public sphere is a truism, but intrusions into one’s private life vis-à-vis relationships is one thing, peering into one’s litany of ailments and outing pictures of the ravages of time quite another. Khanna is a sitting Member of Parliament from Gurdaspur, and his health is of consequence to his constituents, but he should have had the agency to inform them at a time of his choosing. Unless non-disclosure is outright detrimental to public interest, it’s best to let people be during their convalescence or slow march into the sunset. That is the reason why we haven’t seen and heard much of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and George Fernandes these past few years. We remember them at their best.
