Shammi Kapoor — The elegance of a flamboyant Yahoo

This morning, an old and long extinguished flame — and now a grandmother thrice over — sent an SMS saying her first love had died.

Who, I SMS’d back, thinking I seemed well enough.

Shammi Kapoor, she wrote back.

The news stilled me for a moment. Some people, you begin to believe, will never die.

For me, Shammi Kapoor was one such.

He was, verily, a part of my boyhood and early adulthood. Or at least, his songs were.

Ten minutes would not pass before one or the other of his songs would come on, either on the radio or from some loudspeaker somewhere – including during the interminable Ramlila performances that began at 7 pm and went on, with hiccups, till midnight.

And there perhaps lies the mystery of the indelibility of Mr Kapoor’s legacy – the songs.

He was not a “great” actor. But he brought such energy to even the most mundane of scenes that the audience loved him.

And he acted out some of the greatest songs ever.

If those songs could have been sung the way they were only by Mohammad Rafi (and a few by Kishore Kumar), they could have been picturised the way they were only by Shammi Kapoor. No other actor then could have pulled it off.

But by the yardsticks of those who were middle-aged in the 1960s, Shammi was a vulgar gyrator of his hips who, moreover, made faces at the camera and expected the audience to believe that was acting. Truth be told, the audience believed it.

But what gyrations, what faces!

The trick when you want to be vulgar, especially when women are present, is to do it with panache and elegant flamboyance.

Shammi Kapoor showed our generation how.

We tried hard to ape Shammi Kapoor but were scorned by the girls who said they swooned only over Shammi.

Now that he is gone, we perhaps have a chance.

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