NEW DELHI, 27 September 2007 — It was a rare occasion with two famous people coming together yesterday on a day marking their birthdays. While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh turned 75 yesterday, Bollywood’s “Evergreen Hero” Dev Anand turned 85. The occasion was further marked with Manmohan releasing Dev’s autobiography “Romancing with life.”
For Manmohan, it was a quiet birthday recuperating after recent surgery. He has been functioning from home since last week. Earlier in the day, among those who wished Manmohan a happy birthday on the telephone were President Pratibha Patil, Vice President Hamid Ansari and Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee.
Sonia Gandhi, Congress chief and chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), was one of the first to greet Manmohan. “She called on the prime minister at his residence early this morning,” sources said. Several senior Congress leaders, Cabinet ministers, chief ministers and other dignitaries sent their greetings and bouquets to the prime minister.
In addition to the two sharing the birthday, another connection between the two is their being from undivided Punjab, the area which now falls in Pakistan.
For Dev, such a birthday celebration was a great one, even though guests from the movie industry did not attend it. “The book is about me and not about my co-stars,” he said explaining the reason behind this.
Dev’s book, published by Penguin India, is the first-ever full-fledged memoir written by a prominent Bollywood star. In addition to writing extensively about the ups and downs he has faced in Bollywood, Dev has not failed to write about the flings and affairs that he has been through. What also stands out is his open criticism of certain politicians, including the late Indira Gandhi, who was the country’s prime minister from 1966 till 1977 and from 1980 to 1984. On the emergency imposed by Indira in 1975, Dev writes: “When Indira Gandhi declared Emergency, her image shattered in my mind, like the minds of the majority of her countrymen. Probably she had become a prisoner of her coterie of advisers and fortune-seeking friends, in her aloofness from the people that mattered.”
From writing about how he spent the 1930s in Gurdaspur and Lahore, Dev moves on to describe his struggle in Bombay in the 1940s. Tales of his film journey include his friendship with Guru Dutt, the unfortunate romance with Suraiya, marriage with Kalpana Kartik and ties with his brothers, Chetan and Vijay, who were also prominent Bollywood personalities. Dev has also written about his closeness with Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor, the music of S.D. and R.D. Burman and all the heroines he launched, including Geeta Bali, Madhubala, Meena Kumari, Nutan, Vyjayanthimala, Mumtaz, Hema Malini, Waheeda Rehman, Zeenat Aman and Tina Munim.
Dev’s “romance” with life includes details of his being “desperately” in love with Zeenat Aman only to be broken hearted to see Raj Kapoor throwing his arms around her at a party. “My heart was broken to pieces... I wanted to leave the party at once and go off somewhere alone, to be just be myself, so that I could swallow the humiliation thrust on my ego,” Dev writes. Yet, he explains that his autobiography is not a film. In his words: “My autobiography is a book, it is not a film — don’t mistake it for that. There is just one star in it, and he is the one who has written it.”
