 "Kumar Gaurav is much more than Sanjay Dutt’s brother-in-law")
Kumar Gaurav must be the shortest-lived superstar of Bollywood. His debut film _Love Story_ in 1981 was a historic hit. It broke records all over the country. Then it broke Gaurav’s career.
Nothing he did after Love Story was even remotely comparable at the box office. Trade pundits blame the wrong choices for Gaurav’s swift downfall. But Vinod Pande’s Star and Bharathiraja’s Lovers were not wrong choices. On the contrary, they are superior romantic films than Love Story with better performances and superior music.
In fact, RD Burman was much more in his element in Gaurav’s Romance than Love Story. RD actually hated the chartbuster Yaad aa rahi hai in Love Story. In Romance he gave Gaurav a much more melodious and sophisticated yaad song, Aayee ayee teri yaad ayee which went unnoticed when the film bombed miserably.
Why were Gaurav’s films after Love Story such thundering flops? The actor was excellent in two Mahesh Bhatt directed films Janam and Naam. Janam went unnoticed and in Naam, Gaurav’s brother-in-law Sanjay Dutt walked away with all the acclaim just because the more aggressive character and the louder performance always wins in Hindi cinema.
In Janam, Gaurav played Mahesh Bhatt. Janam was a watershed moment of sorts, as it chronicled the story of an illegitimate son who grows into a filmmaker with just one ambition: to be one-up on his father and be acknowledged by him. It had something raw and real about it,as the story was unfolding in the life of the filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, who in his own words was going through it and wrote it as he lived it.
Games
View AllBut while Mahesh Bhatt’s other autobiographical films including Zakhm and Naam are etched in our memories, the impact-friendly Janam, a 16-mm telefilm made for Doordarshan with Kumar Gaurav and Shernaz Patel in the lead got lost in time. Janam was telecasted in 1985. The movie received a lot of accolades and was included in the Panorama section of the 1986 International Film Festival of India (IFFI).
Mahesh Bhatt was never afraid to expose his life although his family was outraged and not happy at all when he made Janam. The film was about fighting in the social space against the existing norms of the society and breaking away from it. The idea of anybody giving birth to himself is very relevant. It is the story of a person who refuses to be defined by references of the world, as he wants to create his own destiny.
Janam will always remain Kumar Gaurav’s entry card into the hall of fame. It’s proof that talent is not what makes an actor a star. It is luck.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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