Why no SRK will ever out-romance Rajesh Khanna

When you’re born to a generation that was destined to save its favourite middle school memories in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai pop-up cards, you would expect Rajesh Khanna to remain relegated to the odd non prime time movie on TV, paper cut-outs tucked under the mother’s mothballed sarees or a bunch of LPs catching dust under old dictionaries and math books.

Only, I was born to a family where the father risked losing a full-head of hair to get a lacquered lock to lay exactly the way it did on Rajesh Khanna’s forehead in Aradhana. A family where the aunt is said to have rejected Bengali doctors and engineers for the not-so-elaborate uncle who has the names of all Rajesh Khanna movies neatly arranged in his head in a frighteningly accurate virtual catalogue. Where the uncle rattles off product numbers of all EPs and LPs of Rajesh Khanna movies he sold after he joined the biggest music production company of those times.

Rajesh Khanna, and this might be true for several Indian families, was a lore that our generation grew up with. And despite generous doses of classical British literature and nineties boy band pop, Rajesh Khanna, would form the bedrock of all definitions of romance that life would bring forth.

I had Roop Tera Mastana by heart by the time I was ten, which had led to several family embarrassments in scores of Tagore-worshipping Bengali family gatherings. I saw Aradhana on Doordrashan, just a couple of days after I read my first Mills and Boons. I was 14. It was to become one of those films I would always go back on a sick day at home, on a hung-over Sunday afternoon, on a dozen Valentine’s Days I never had a date.

Khanna’s films defined romance like it possibly could be in an average Joe’s life – sans Switzerland, sans Hindi pick-up lines, sans waxed chests and a hero singing in a crowded-with-firangs, disco-balled, pub. Suspension of disbelief was probably so much easier – with a little help from a mush-magnet called Mere Sapnon Ki Rani, it was almost easy to fancy a guy in a jeep running after your toy train. Or believe all great romances start with the rains on the hillside with a cosily lit cave in the vicinity.

And then college happened with its customary denunciation of Bollywood candyfloss. But Rajesh Khanna remained. From the delicate relationship between a world-weary, irony-spewing babu and a beautiful prostitute in Amar Prem brought alive by some of the most stunningly written songs ever (Kuch to Log Kahenge, Yeh Kya Hua, Chingari Koi Bhadke) to Kati Patang, a sharp, engrossing take on the Bollywood staples of love, betrayal and lust, Rajesh Khanna films made romance so believable, that it made a card-holding communist want to fall in love – of the rains without warning, dahlia in spring kind.

Khanna’s LPs are the only showpieces in my modest Kolkata living room. They are not dusted by the domestic help. My father does it every weekend because he says it gets songs playing in his head. And it’s yesterday once more. Strangely enough, I understand.