It was a year back but the absence of any event commemorating the first death anniversary of South Asia’s greatest cinema star of an era, would have been unthinkable even a few years back. There would have been rekindling of mourning and grief all in all the countries of the region. When Dilip Kumar died on July 7, 2021 due to Covid and other complications, the circumstances were not meant for collective mourning and remembering. This year , he is barely remembered providing the all-important lesson that time is amnesia.  

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Perhaps a better phrase would be, he slipped away from memory.  At 98, he had left his world behind. Delaying further would probably have meant inviting greater anonymity to a life lived in bright lights. It was time for dimming and putting out the bulbs.

He was born in a world in 1922, which can’t be imagined today that it ever existed. A Pathan- Yusuf Ali Khan- was born in Peshawar.  He made it to Mumbai and one day over time reached the top in the cinema world.  On the way Khan morphed into( Dilip) Kumar and that was a recognition of the audience-market- a reality all accepted and ensured that he became a success. He became a super star and didn’t just enthrall his audience with his acting but his leading ladies with his charms as well.

His movies are many that haunt us from a time zone far away courtesy the digital world. Whether Anand, Ganga –Jamuna, Mughal-e-Azam and so on , he projected the strong, reliable, honourable man he was paid to play. India needed them under the Nehruvian era where “nation-building” required such heroes and he produced them in one cinema screen after another.   He was as much if not a better politician of India just past. Today, the audience has many channels to switch on and choose their pet love or hate but in his time, all roads led only to the cinema hall, where the hero swayed the audience and swooned the heroines like few did as he did.     

And Dilip Kumar had many loves. From Nimmi to Madhubala to Vyjayantimnala and on and on. He finally settled down with the “Kashmir-ke Koli” girl, Saira Bano. Even in this long marriage he had a brief marriage to one Asma for 2 years.  He was never really meant to forget who he was. The charm became a way of life, cheering him to live on and sort of forget that time was always waiting on the street in the dark to take him home.

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But can a star be ever forgotten in the digital era ? He was always the super star and always did the song and dance routine and they live on. Strangely enough, his entire movies may be rarely seen by today’s audience, but anyone interested in Hindi music will always see him alive and charming the boots off the devil’s foot through the songs, as dramatic as the cinema itself.  In an odd way, the man who now represents the era gone by, has been kept alive by the era that is a stranger to him.  

Live on, sing on, play your charm and demeanor.  Dilp Kumars can no longer die.