Anupam Kher - Lessons Life Taught Me, Unknowingly: An Autobiography

By the same author

The Best Thing about You Is YOU!

Hay House Publishers (India) Pvt. Ltd.
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Copyright Anupam Kher 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the authors own and the facts are as reported by him, which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

Photo credits:
All photographs used are from the authors personal collection.
Cover photograph: Atul Kasbekar

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise be copied for public or private use other than for fair use as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews, without prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-93-88302-04-3
ISBN 978-93-88302-05-0 (ebook)

Designed and typeset at Hay House India

Printed and bound at
Thomson Press (India) Ltd., Faridabad, Haryana (India)

To
Those who dare to dream.
And succeed!

PartI
The Early Years

PartII
The Curtain Rises

PartIII
Ready? Action!

PartIV
The Masters

PartV
Being Politically [In]Correct

PartVI
Spreading the Wings

Memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I am going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.

Robert R. McCammon, Boys Life

I started writing my autobiography at the age of 10, way before I became an actor, a movie star or an award-winning performer. I unconsciously stored vignettes of memories of my family, my early childhood and encounters with other actors, directors and performers in the years to comesoaking in every experience.

I have steeped myself in the adventure of living, in the highs and the lows and most importantly, in the arduous, exhilarating and creative process of acting.

Because I have lived my life so fully, I developed an almost photographic memory of most eventsrecalling at will both big and small encounters and events, visuals and voices, sounds and smells.

It is pure magic that my autobiography is now organically gaining a voice, shedding light on the people who have touched my life and holding a mirror to my existencea pulsing chord that links the ten-year-old to the person I am today.

Aptly summed up by the legendary Colombian writer Gabriel (Jos de la Concordia) Garca Mrquez who wrote in his autobiography Living to Tell the Tale: Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

In my minds eye, it all started with the survival instinct of being born into and raised in a lower middle-class family. Reading the renowned Russian masters like Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky or even Charlie Chaplin, I realise a major impetus was their resilient instinct to face life at every twist and turn, overcoming every hurdle with grit and determination.

Even today, I remember how special it felt when at the age of three, my maternal grandfather, Lambodhar Kak, gifted me a gold coin, though I did not fully comprehend its worth. I remember everything vividly and have forgotten almost nothingthe first time my mother slapped me, my first day at school, the first time my class teacher beat me with a cane, my first love, my first rejection, the first theatre role I got, the first film role, my highs and lows, the successes and failures.

As I narrate my life, it is not as a flashback, but it is pulsating alive and in the moment. I am living it in telling it. It is not presented as a one dimensional photograph but as a happening, breathing, evolving multi-dimensional moment to be shared.

Retrospect gives its own perspective. In March 2016, I received the prestigious Padma Bhushan from the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, in the glittering, spectacular and hallowed halls of the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

On that occasion, I was elated by a sense of achievement but also humbled as I held the award in my handpoised at the pinnacle, savouring the moment but remaining grounded as I recalled my roots from where I had sprung.

If I were to sum up my life in what I hold dearest to me, I would choose the strength of family, vitality of optimism and the energy of the creative process. My chosen career melds all three in a way that enriches both my performance and my persona. At every turn, one or all of these have been my beacon, illuminated my pathway, pulled me back from the abyss, propelled me to dizzying heights and made me the person I amthe entity the world knows as Anupam Kher.

My childhood was shaped by living with my grandfather, Pandit Amar Nath Kher, and I infused a lot of him into my first major film role in Mahesh Bhatts Saaransh (The Essence) portraying both his physical and mental characteristics. My family and film career blended seamlessly with Saaransha watershed in my life and after years of struggle and disappointment, this film launched my career, my stardom and my first major award.

I recall as if it were yesterday, the day I delivered the mahurat shot for Saaransh in 1984. My first shot was a slow-motion scene of me getting the news from America that my son has been murdered in a senseless act of violence in a subway in New York. Director Mahesh Bhatt briefed that dramatic sequence to me, as to how the phone rings, I pick it and hear a voice from the other side say: Aapka beta mara gaya hai (Your son has been murdered) and what my expression should be for the camera. In any case, I was obsessed with the story of the film... with the role of B. V. Pradhan and for that particular shot, I distilled all the frustration, all the heartbreaks, all the humiliation that I had faced through the years. Even after the shot was completed, it took a while to shake off the pensive mood from my psyche.

The shoot was to start at 9.30 that morning. As the set was being prepared, I went up to Mahesh Bhatt and said: Now that we are launching the film which I was thrown out of and signed back on (a story of uncanny destiny that appears in later chapters), I would like to know what demonstrates my character, the defining emotion of B. V. Pradhan, because I want to make that emotion the most encompassing oneis it disappointment, compassion, love, what is it? Who is B. V. Pradhan? How do you summarise his spirit?

He answered simply: Compassion. And that became my guiding post.

Saaransh was not just my personal obsession. It was a gift to prove myself, to make my dreams a reality. During the entire filming, Mahesh Bhatt too was passionate about finding his groove having done the film Arth before this in 1982 with Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Raj Kiran in the lead. Whenever we spent time together, whether travelling, during our morning walks, on the sets or in the office, anywhere and everywhere, all our conversations centred on the film. We would reinvent the scenes, recompose and rewrite them.