![]() Despite the occasional spark, flops began to accumulate like paragraphs in the obituary notice of a debutant. Mehmood got him a part in something called Garam Masala, which turned out to be pretty lukewarm. Like other newcomers, Amitabh took what he got, anxious for a hit in the clutch of misses. You don’t really want to know about Pyar ki Kahani or Sanjog, which even generally complimentary trade reviewers dismissed as trite. The 1969 film flopped, as did a few other unmentionables. This is what you begin life selling eggs for you wait for destiny to hatch a few Impalas and Jaguars.Īmitabh’s first film, Saat Hindustani, was made by KA Abbas, a soft-left ideologue who survived on sincerity and a famous column in Blitz weekly. The next two decades could only have been predicted by an imaginative astrologer: 300 films, awards aplenty, imported limousines and racehorses. Guru Dutt gave Mehmood a mini-break, in CID, for which he was deeply grateful, as a stopgap villain. Mehmood’s most creative odd job was teaching Meena Kumari table tennis it did lead to his first marriage, to Meena Kumari’s sister Madhu. He had to work as a child: a brief cameo in the 1943 film Kismet, or selling chicken and eggs on the street, before graduating to a salary as a driver of a well-known film director, PL Santoshi. Mehmood, born in 1932, knew everything there was to find out about deprivation. ![]() So, once upon a time, there was a comedian named Mehmood, son of Mumtaz Ali, an actor-dancer who spent a frugal career within the marginal category just above extras in the fluid caste hierarchy of Bollywood cinema. Every legend begins with the same phrase: Once upon a time… ![]()
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