The Junglee Prince is No More

Nagesh Sidhanti, my friend from Bangalore, jolted me from my morning reverie with this terse message that had only two lines.

I got up to post my first thoughts on Facebook. And i couldn't go beyond "Tum mujhe yun bhula na paaogey".

Thirty one years back, when Rafi Saab passed away, he had mournfully said, "I have lost my voice". Today it is his turn to go. The voice went away then. Today the man has gone.

Shammi Kapoor leaves this world of cinema and entertainment a lot poorer. Whe

re are we going to find someone who could combine boisterousness and sincere gravity with a lot of emotion and playful childishness with an almost effortlessly gay abandon ?

Where will we find someone who brought rock and roll on the screen in the early sixties and gave us superlative hits one after the other?

Romancing away, dancing away, making people laugh with his antics, and then suddenly becoming serious and taking over a melodramatic situation to believable and credible levels, Shammi Kapoor created a new genre in the days when acting probably meant a big gap with hamming on the one end and being wooden on the other.

Yahoo became the netizen's buzzword much later. We learnt it long back. Leaning out of a car or a chopper and singing out to a lady love came with great ease to Shammi. He was the master in this craft. I wonder if anybody ever will be able to shake his neck the way he did, legs a lot have learnt to shake.

The very fact that most advertisements today have songs of his playing in the background symbolizes Shammi Saab's evergreen stature. Just listen to Nigahon Nigahon mein jaadu chalana meri jaan seekha hai tumney jahan se......and you will know.

Long live Shammi Kapoor. You were the perfect Junglee...the noisy Jaanwar, the evergreen Budtameez, the ever present Bluff Master. But you were also the Prince. The lovable Brahmachari.

Tomorrow, when the country will be celebrating Independence Day, your mortal remains will be consigned to the flames, and you will be singing -"Ganga meri maa ka naam baap ka naam Himalaya, ab tum khud hi faisla kar lo main kis soobey wallah".

RIP- Sukh sapnon mein kho jaao.........tum so jaao