“I’m a naughty boy chasing butterflies in the garden of life,” Dilip Kumar confided in all seriousness when he was 65, but as fit as a commando.
I was doing a piece for a news magazine and spent a whole day interspersed with food, music, poetry and other ingredients of the good life in the great man’s company. Call it a journalist’s perks if you like.
Veteran actor Dilip Kumar died at 98 after a prolonged illness
Image Credit: GN Archives
The Tragedy King, who died at 98 on July 7 after a prolonged illness, was bigger than Bollywood and certainly bigger than Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan combined. He enthralled an entire nation like no other actor in ‘Mughal-e-Azam’ (1960), ‘Devdas’ (1955), ‘Ram aur Shyam’ (1967), ‘Ganga Jamuna’ (1961), ‘Naya Daur’ (1957), ‘Andaaz’ (1949), ‘Aan’ (1952) and ‘Madhumati’ (1958), which are counted as classics among his 60 odd films in a career spanning six decades after his debut in 1944 with ‘Jwar Bhata’.