Rajesh Khanna ranked among the top superstars of his era, yet faced a sharp drop in his fame later on. Filmmaker R Balki remembers him staying just as committed, diligent, humorous, and professional right up to his last days. Balki even helmed the icon’s final ad campaign for a well-known ceiling fan company.“It was a beautiful experience. I can never forget when I went to him. I never called him ‘Kaka’. I called him ‘Sir,’” Balki shared fondly. Released in 2012, the ad showed Khanna reflecting on his devoted followers, then humorously noting that though his people might be gone, fans remained by his side. In the backdrop, ceiling and table fans gently wafted air toward him as he whistled the melody of his timeless hit “Ye Sham Mastani” from the 1970 ‘Shakti Samanta’ classic ‘Kati Patang’.
“I read out the script to him. He laughed. I asked him, ‘You’re understanding the script na?’ He said, ‘Why are you asking me this?’ He was quite ill at that point of time. I said, ‘I’m saying all your fans have gone away, but I’ll always have Havells by me.’ I was actually doing the truth in a funny way. He told me, ‘Babu moshai, you think I’d been a superstar if I didn’t have a sense of humour?,’” recalled Balki on a podcast on the Mama’s Couch YouTube channel.Balki futher recalled, “He was suffering. We were shooting in Bangalore. He had to fly in an air ambulance. He had an IV drip in one hand. He came to the set in a wheelchair. He could get up, they’d remove the drip, and he could shoot exactly for 45 seconds before he’d have to go back”.With barely seven minutes of footage available for a one-minute ad, a situation Balki called “unheard of”, the director faced an extraordinary challenge. He said, ‘We’ll do a film together.’ He passed away a couple of weeks after that”. The filmmaker confessed he never experienced the superstar’s golden era during the 1960s and early 1970s.“It was very emotional because I saw him in the worst state possible, in the most thin, fragile state. He knew he didn’t have much time,” said Balki. The director revealed his stronger fandom for Amitabh Bachchan, who shared the screen with Rajesh Khanna in the 1971 film ‘Anand’ and went on to cover him as Hindi cinema’s reigning superstar that decade. “That’s also like cinema, no?,” added Balki.
