On May 31 last year, I walked into Regal Cinema in Mumbai for the centenary tribute to Raj Khosla and the launch of Amborish Roy choudhury, Anita Khosla, and Uma Khosla Kapur’s.
Raj Khosla: The Authorized Biography, for which I had written the foreword.
I was not prepared for what I saw.
The place was packed.
In an age when memory has become short and the past disposable, hundreds of people had come to remember a filmmaker born a hundred years ago.
Pooja was with me. Asha Parekh was there, still carrying that unmistakable grace. After the customary speeches, the memories and the book launch, the lights went down.
A restored print of Mera Gaon Mera Desh began to play.
And suddenly I wasn’t seventy-seven.
I was that young boy again.
The credits rolled. My name appeared on that giant Regal screen in two places — assistant director and production controller.
I nudged Pooja and pointed.
“There. That’s me.”
Fifty-five years disappeared in a second.
Then Dharmendra appeared. Vinod Khanna. Asha Parekh.
Pooja looked at the two men filling the enormous screen and whispered:
“Papa, these were real men.”
I laughed.
She was right.
There was something elemental about them. Dharmendra carried the dust and sweat of the earth on his body. Vinod Khanna, as Jabbar Singh, had the dangerous magnetism of a man the camera could not look away from. And Asha Parekh was not merely beautiful. She was a thinking actress. Raj Khosla understood that a woman’s face contained a world beyond prettiness.
Mera Gaon Mera Desh became a mega hit and helped propel Vinod Khanna towards stardom in an era when Rajesh Khanna ruled the popular imagination.
But for me, the film was something else.
It was my film school.
I never went to a film institute.
Raj Khosla was my institute.
The film took us to Udaipur, to Chirwa, a village not far from Nathdwara. And as Pooja and I sat watching the restored film, the song Kuch Kehta Hai Yeh Sawan came on.
I leaned towards her.
“Watch this.”
The camera begins at the top of the swing and tilts down until it discovers Asha Parekh swinging beneath the tree.
Then I told Pooja:
“I suggested this shot to Raj Saab.”
That is why the shot has stayed with me for fifty-five years.
I was nobody. An assistant. A production hand. A boy who had openly admitted that he knew nothing about movies. But an image had occurred to me: why not begin at the top and let the camera travel down and discover the woman on the swing?
I suggested it.
Raj Saab used it.
That was my first foray into the world of movies and images.
For the first time in my life, something that had existed only inside my head became an image that other people could see.
I had entered cinema.
And fifty-five years later, I was sitting in the darkness of Regal Cinema beside my daughter, pointing to that same image.
There are hundreds of memories of Mera Gaon Mera Desh, but a few refuse to fade.
John Frankenheimer, the great Hollywood filmmaker, once came with his team to Chandivali Studio while we were picturizing a song with Lakshmi Chhaya. He wanted to see how Indian movies were made.
What astonished him were the conditions.
The heat. The chaos. The limited resources.
And yet somehow, out of all that, a movie emerged.
That was the Indian film industry I entered.
We made abundance out of scarcity.
I remember the song recordings even more vividly.
There was no stitching together a performance later. The song began at the beginning and had to reach the end.
One mistake — and everybody started again.
The singer. The musicians. The technicians.
Everybody held his breath.
Perhaps even the man carrying the tea.
And look at the people in that room.
Mohammed Rafi.
Lata Mangeshkar.
Asha Bhosle.
Lakshmikant-Pyarelal.
Anand Bakshi.
And at the centre of that universe, Raj Khosla.
My boss.
My first teacher.
The man who opened the door.
Mera Gaon Mera Desh would go on to become part of the bloodstream of Hindi popular cinema. Amita Malik called it our first “Eastern Western.” Years later, some of its dramatic DNA — the village under siege, the outlaw, the reluctant hero, the landscape turned into a battleground — would find a grander reincarnation in Sholay.
But before Sholay, there was Mera Gaon Mera Desh.
And before whatever I became, there was Raj Khosla.
I can still remember my first meeting with him at Mehboob Studio.
He looked at me and asked:
“Do you know anything about films?”
“No, sir. Nothing.”
He smiled.
“Fantastic. Zero is a great figure to begin from.”
I did not know then that he had given me a sentence I would carry for the rest of my life.
I began from zero.
Then came the films. The hits. The disasters. The applause. The humiliation. The dizzying heights and the heartbreaking lows. Director, producer, writer, mentor — all the labels that gather around you if you survive long enough in this business.
But the first lesson came before all of them.
Zero is a great figure to begin from.
Perhaps that is why that evening at Regal affected me so deeply.
Cinema gives us the illusion that it can defeat time.
It cannot.
People disappear.
Studios burn.
Negatives turn to ash.
Stars become photographs.
And eventually even those who remember begin to disappear.
But sometimes an image survives.
A camera begins at the top of a swing.
It tilts down.
A young Asha Parekh enters the frame.
And somewhere in the darkness, fifty-five years later, an old man touches his daughter’s arm and says:
“I thought of that shot.”
For me, that is Mera Gaon Mera Desh.
Not merely a successful film.
Not merely the beginning of an extraordinary phase in Raj Khosla’s career.
It is the place where I first discovered the intoxicating secret of cinema:
You see something inside your head.
You dare to say it aloud.
Someone believes you.
And suddenly the whole world can see it.
So on the fifty-fifth anniversary of Mera Gaon Mera Desh, I bow to Raj Khosla.
My first teacher.
The man who allowed a boy who knew nothing about cinema to suggest a shot.
And then put that shot in his film.
Fifty-five years later, I finally understand the generosity contained in those first words he said to me:
“Zero is a great figure to begin from.”
It was.
It still is.
(As Told To Bharati Dubey)
