RIP Shammi Kapoor

I have been terribly sad the last few days. In Shammi Kapoor's passing, I feel as though I've lost a favorite relative. Let me clarify that I am NOT a die-hard fan.....he was before my time and my first filmy crush was actually Mithun Chakraborty (please don't judge me...I lived in Kolkata during those tender years). My dear dad is a big Mohd. Rafi fan and I actually heard songs picturized on Shammi Kapoor before I ever laid eyes on him. When I saw some of his movies much later, I was not impressed. I liked the sauve and posh Shashi much better. Raj was too fake-happy and Shammi was just plain kooky, given to dangling death-defyingly in a bathrobe from a helicopter and crazily flailing his appendages about and daring to call it dancing. Everything about him was over the top....his dress-sense, to his dialog delivery (remember those lips that would form an "O" no matter what emotion he was professing?), his body language to the intensity with which he gazed upon his girl.


However, here I am, unable to stop watching all his evergreen songs on You Tube since his death. It occurs to me that one cannot think of Shammi Kapoor as a separate entity....it is always in tandem with songs in Rafi's voice. Rafi's songs seemed to flow through Shammi's body, to the extent that Shammi would articulate every line of any given song with a gesture, a flick of his head or something totally outrageous and unexpected.....if I had a penny for every time that he flipped his head to gaze at his girl upside down or seemed to stretch impossibly with one hand clutching a tree trunk and the other reaching out......classic Shammisms!


I realize that my sadness has a lot to do with memories of "Chitrahaar" and "Rangoli" on TV, of writing down lyrics of these songs and attempting to sing them (My buddy C introduced me to this particular habit and for a long time, we both maintained notebooks with indexed lyrics....completely redundant in these Google days, of course), of closing my eyes and letting the lyrics and music seep in, lost in juvenile fantasies. It is a sadness of a childhood lost to adult pursuits, of memories of innocent times when boy met girl, boy "phasaoed" girl, they sang some memorable songs, boy fought the villain Pran and everybody laughed happily in the end.


RIP Shammi Kapoor, thanks for the memories!