Rajesh Khanna, the first superstar of Hindi cinema, is no more. He will, however, remain alive and youthful through the magic of cinema.
The soul of that magic lies in timeless human emotions, such as love, to which Khanna gave a face and Kishore Kumar lent a voice. His glory days were arguably the last days of a quieter, gentler India. Those were the days when the delightful films of Hrishikesh Mukherjee were made. Khanna was the lead in Hrishida’s Anand, Bawarchi and Namak Haram.
He was no action hero. He romanced the girls, and they loved him to bits. Machismo was not his style; it was more about gentleness, smiles, tears and poetry. He was, in some ways, a successor to Dev Anand.
The gentleness of those films, and of those who acted in them, has long passed. Even the anger of the angry young man is now the stuff of nostalgia.
Cinema seems to be reaching further towards spectacle to stand out. The movies that are the biggest globally are made on gargantuan budgets and employ more technology than a minor space programme. The stories, too, are literally out of this world.
In India, too, some signs of a movement in that direction are evident, though budgets here only reach a fraction of the Hollywood biggies. Ra.One, for instance, was made on about $25 million, a tenth of what the latest Batman film cost.
In the end, Anand will probably continue to move people long after Ra.One has been forgotten. And some great Kishore Kumar song may well outlast even the redoubtable Batman.