I felt that Mukehrjee, prolific as he is, could use his own -- I thought maybe people would like to share their thoughts on his films, etc. It seems, unfortunately, though, that I might have been wrong about this...
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viewtopic.php?p=74169

http://www.samachar.com/showurl.htm?rur ... erjee~dead

Filmmaker Hrishikesh Mukherjee dead

Mumbai: Veteran filmmaker Hrishikesh Mukherjee, who directed several memorable movies including Anand that launched Amitabh Bachchan on the path to superstardom, died at a hospital in Mumbai. He was 84.

Mukherjee was admitted to Leelavati Hospital in June in a critical condition following chronic renal failure, pneumonia and sepsis, hospital sources said. He had been coming to the hospital regularly for dialysis. The end came at 4:30 p.m.

His funeral is likely to be held on Monday or Tuesday after his son returns from the United States.

Mukherjee directed many a blockbuster Hindi movie, regaling the audience with the typical Hrishida touch. He won the coveted Dadasaheb Phalke award and Padma Vibhushan.

Some of his memorable films include Anand, starring Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh among others, Abhimaan, featuring Amitabh and Jaya Bhaduri, Chupke Chupke, with Amitabh, Jaya and Dharmendra in the cast and Khubsoorat, starring Rekha.

Having done his apprenticeship under legendary Bimal Roy, Mukherjee started his career with Musafir in 1957 and his last work was Jhooth Bole Kauwa Kaate, starring Anil Kapoor and Juhi Chawla, released in 1998.

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http://sify.com/movies/bollywood/fullst ... d=14281243

Farewell, Hrishikesh Mukherjee
Subhash K Jha

They're waiting for Hrishida's only survining son to arrive from the US before he's sent away for good to God. And I think of that moment in Hrishida's Aashirwaad when the old and dying Ashok Kumar stumbles into his estranged daughter's wedding to bless her before kicking the bucket.

Anupam Kher tells a very interesting story about Hrishikesh Mukherjee. "We were shooting for his last film Jhoot Bole Kauva Kate . Hrishida's legs had given way, and he'd sit and direct us. I playfully asked him if all his parts had stopped working. 'No Anupam, my most vital parts still work fine.' Hrishida answered with a smile."

An eminent, very sober and refined filmmaker who has been closely associated with Hrishida tells another story about the prolific Mukherjee's during his final days. "I had gone there expecting him to be mournful and doom-laden. Instead Hrishida cracked one dirty joke after another for a full hour. Finally I got embarrassed and fled." Hrishida loved a good laugh. You only have to see Gol Maal, Khubsoorat, Bawarchi or even the lesser known laughathons Buddha Mil Gaya , Naram Garam and Jhoothi to know how much this amazing man enjoyed the lighter side of life.

About his penchant for laughter Hrishida once told me, "To keep laughing is the most important thing in life. Our aim in life is to be happy. But we go wrong looking for happiness in transitory pleasures.You fall in love with a girl and pin your happiness on her. She dumps you. You produce a son and you place all your dreams in him. He leaves you. Happiness shouldn't control your life. You should control happiness."

And yet this man who made such super -comedies also directed some of life's most lingering moments of tragic pathos in Anuradha(the story of how a male ego thwarts a woman's talents, inspired by Kishore Kumar's marriage to his first wife Ruma) and later its quasi-remake Abhimaan, Anupama(about a man who hates his daughter after his wife dies in childbirth, the story was inspired by Hrishida's uncle who became an alcoholic after his wife died during childbirth) , Satyakam(the director's favourite work featuring his "favourite actor and humanbeing" Dharmendra) , Anand(based on Hrishida's intense friendship with Raj Kapoor, featuring Amitabh Bachchan as Hrishida and Rajesh Khanna as Raj Kapoor).

Before he moved to the hospital two months before his death, Hrishida was completely bed-ridden for close to two years. The intermittent visitor apart , he lay there inert staring at the ceiling probably reliving all the golden moments from his cinema. But the spirit never flagged. My last conversation with Hrishida had him imploring me to visit him. "Beta, come and see me soon. I'm just counting my days now." I never got around to paying Hrishida that visit. My friend Sanjay Leela Bhansali(a huge Hrishida fan and highly influenced by his simple yet sensitive narrative patterns) and I kept planning a visit before it was too late.

But now the man who created some of Hindi cinema's most endearing and enduring mirror images of the middleclass is gone. When I visited him some years ago Hrishida had moved into a highrise in Bandra , just next to where his bungalow used to be. There he sat with his arthritis and memories, trying to cope with both. His living room had only one picture prominently at its center , that of Lata Mangeshkar.

"People call her a reincarnation of Saraswati Mata. I call her Saraswati . Beta, do you know this is where Lata and I sat with composers like Sachin Dev Burman and Rahul Dev Burman and Salil Chowdhary to compose those gems in Abhimaan, Jurmana and Anand ?" He then revealed an unknown facet of Lataji's personality. " Beta, do you know she doesn't charge a single paisa for any of the songs that she sings for me? She once made a mistake while singing one of my songs Ek baat kahoon for R.D. Burman in Gol Maal. I had my answer ready for people who asked why I allowed Lata to sing wrongly. 'A wrong Lata is worth more than all the right singers in the industry.'

And then Hrishidaa laughed loudly. He loved his fun and games. Simi Garewal recalls how he spent hours playing chess with her during Namak Haraam. "What an erudite and entertaining filmmaker. I learnt so much from him". Hrishida loved all his actors. From Ashok Kumar who was a permanent fixture in a majority of his films, to Rajesh Khanna whom Hrishida affectionately called Pintu Baba, to Rekha(for whom he had a special Tamilian term of affection ) , Jaya. And Sharmila Tagore. Hrishida's well-wishers wanted him to sign Nutan for Anupama. "How can Sharmila play the demure repressed character when she's busy running around in a bikini in An Evening In Paris? But I knew she had the expressive eyes for it," Hrishida told me.

Jaya and Amitabh Bachchan were Hirishida's favourite. AB went to Hrishida to say he was marrying Jaya. "I told Jaya I'll be attending her marriage from my son Amitabh's side." The filmmaker was very unhappy with the kind of work AB did the the 1980s. "Many directors reduced him to a stunt man. Some people thought I had blundered badly by making Amit sing classical songs in Alaap when he was holding guns and booze bottles."

Alaap was made during the Emergency. "It was a depressing film because I was very depressed. I thought it was the end of my life. I couldn't believe Mrs Gandhi had become such a dictator." To snap out of the doomed mood Hrishida made the comedy Khubsoorat . Explaining the hop and the skip from the grim directorial debut of Musafir to the grin mood in Biwi Aur Makaan, from the dark Majhli Didi and Satyakam to the frothy Guddi and Chupke Chupke , from the nifty Naram Garam to the elegiac Jurmana and Bemisal…Hrishida said, "I'm an agnostic. I believe my conscience is my God. But having said that we're all creatures of moods.

At times you want to cry , at others times you want to laugh your head off. Critics ask me why I always have a death scene. I'll tell you why. Death is the ultimate truth. Deven Varma once observed Sabse Bada Sukh(India's first sex comedy!) was my only film where no one died. I told Deven he was wrong. It flopped so miserably that it killed the distributors." Sobering down Hrishida lamented on the quality of present day cinema. "Everyone is stealing stories from laser discs. I confess I'm guilty of making potboilers like Do Dil and Asli Naqli. That's because I had a unit and their family to maintain. I am aware my talent is severely restricted . I can never make a film like Satyajit Ray . I console myself with the thought that I ve made decent films on family values which have touched people's hearts. I've made films which have recovered their investments and fed my unit."

After his last film Jhooth Bole Kauva Kaate, Hrishida was planning to adapt a short story called The Dressing Table written by music composer Salil Chowdhary. What Hrishida loved about the story was its quaint old-world values. "It talks about the value of a letter at a time when people are sending e-mails to one another." Hey Hrishida, isn't that exactly the sentiment of all your films? Are you listening? Or are you busy telling a dirty joke to someone up there?

http://www.rediff.com/movies/2006/aug/30raja.htm
Art for heart's sake

Raja Sen

August 30, 2006

Sunday morning, I changed the caller tune on my phone. Moved from an English oldie to Har seedhe raste ki ek, the fabulous title song from Golmaal. About eight hours later, a colleague messaged me the news, minutes before it took over the television channels. A lump hit my throat and I instantly flashbacked to last year, when I had called up Hrishida.

Working on a feature on India's best films, I couldn't look past Hrishikesh Mukherjee, the name tempting me from the film directory. Could I get an opinion from the man who made Anand? I called, and he picked up, huskily assuring me that it was he. I stammered out a nervous introduction and, making sure not to cut me off mid-sentence, the filmmaker finally stopped me. "I cannot help you, I'm sorry," he wheezed into the phone. "I am very ill." I hastily muttered an apologetic, awkward goodbye as the line went dead.

I was shattered and, I soon realised, heartbroken. Yes, filmmakers get old and their films live on. Yes, life goes on. But that this would happen to Hrishikesh Mukherjee somehow just hit harder. I felt helpless and greatly dismayed, and was resultantly puzzled. Not just had I never met the man, I also hadn't ever really read up or researched his background and technique. Yet, I felt inexplicably attached to him. All I had done, of course, was fall in love with the films he made. And that's all it takes.

There are filmmakers with a great cinematographic eye, those with powerful use of light and shadow, those who throw their actors over the edge to achieve mammoth performances and those who overwhelm you with sound and fury. In terms of emotion, Hindi cinema is packed with directors conversant with maudlin melancholy and rolling-in-the-aisles humour.

AnandMukherjee's cinema was beyond directorial technique, or storytelling. His are films with depth and one-liners, films with pathos and slapstick, films with farce and grand tragedy � above all, however, they are films bred in familiarity. Absolute familiarity. Wonderfully etched characters are drawn with such tender nuance that not only do we relate to them, they echo people plucked uncannily from our lives. From jobhunters in short kurtas to lanky alcoholics with telescopes, Hrishida's folk have been disarmingly real, even despite great caricature. You can't help loving them.

And it was not as if he drew his actors from the haughty sidelights of parallel cinema. These were superstars, not art-house critical favourites looking scornfully at the mainstream. He gave Amitabh Bachchan visibility in Anand, and subsequently balanced out his angry-young-man credentials with roles of acting significance. In 1973, Hrishida's Abhimaan rose alongside Prakash Mehra's Zanjeer; 1975 was the mammoth year of Ramesh Sippy's Sholay and Yash Chopra's Deewar, but Hrishida did his luminous bit with Mili and Chupke Chupke. His films might not have been Amitabh's blockbusters, but they do give us the megastar's most substantial performances.

The stories are literature by themselves. From immense marital discord to the inevitability of death, from delicate Wodehousean farce to war of the classes, he tackled it all but laced his movies magically with an earnest realism that touched us to the core. Special cinema of course, but crucially special sans fanfare. A Hrishikesh Mukherjee film didn't come with any massive pretentions of grandeur, any conceit of inaccessibility. This was dal-bhaat filmmaking, supremely fresh everyday slices of life, served up unfailingly warm and tender. The films he made discriminated not between frontbenchers and critics, cineastes and collegekids, critics and our mothers.

GolmaalAnd how they endure. From Rajesh Khanna's babumoshaai to Utpal Dutt's eeesh, not to mention lyrical dialogues impossible to forget, the words penetrated the nation's collective lexicon. Even today, cable operators are well aware that their best chance of getting people to watch a poor-quality channel on a Saturday afternoon is to show one of Hrishida's Amol Palekar comedies. And the dramas are infinitely compelling, peopled by characters he turned into our extended family. The stories are ever poignant and never overdone, and we're repeatedly forced back into choking back a sob. Or stifling louder-than-acceptable guffaws with our hands. The magic lies, of course, in the fact that we are often torn by both emotions simultaneously.

Hrishikesh Mukherjee was truly the heart of Hindi cinema. His films have transcended libraries and genre, and simply become a part of who we are. I grew a moustache recently and, despite the Mangal Pandey jibes, my predominant encouragement is drawn from Utpal Dutt's inimitable Golmaal lines on the importance of a man's mouch. I am not a man for funerals, but there are some cases where one just has to pay last respects.

The caller tune on my phone, needless to say, now stays, a tribute to the great humanist filmmaker. It is the kind of song that inevitably makes you break into a grin, but like Hrishida's cinema, the lump in the throat stays alongside the smile.

http://www.rediff.com/movies/2006/aug/31amol.htm

'Hrishida had a childlike smile'


August 31, 2006 14:59 IST

When the Hindi film industry bade adieu to celebrated filmmaker Hrishikesh Mukherjee on Tuesday, Amol Palekar, the bumbling but loveable lead of his hilarious Golmaal, was running a high fever in Pune.

"I was like a son to him. I'm too disturbed to talk now," he told rediff.com then.

But later, he did speak to us about his last two meetings with Hrishida:

The last two times that I met Hrishida, I felt emotionally overwhelmed.

My last meeting with him was when he was in Mumbai's Lilavati hospital. Before that, I met him when he was to be felicitated in Kolkata. Being felicitated by the Bengali community naturally had a significance for Hrishida. But he could not attend it due to his poor health, and that was a matter of regret to him.

When I talked to him before going to that function, he felt very nice. However, at the function, I was embarrassed to find that among all the Bollywood celebrities who had promised to be there, I was the only one present eventually.

In my speech, I talked about our association, and mentioned that I was privileged to be so close to this beautiful human being. But even if I had not had that privilege, I would consider it a great honour merely to be a postman and carry the manpatra (scroll of honour) that was being given to Hrishida that day by the Bengali film industry and film lovers. I meant every word of it. When this was reported to him by his friends, Hrisihida was emotionally disturbed, and happy, both at the same time. But seeing such a great man in this most vulnerable state was a painful experience to me.

At the last meeting in the hospital, his family members were quite disturbed by the fact that apart from Gulzarsahab and me, nobody from the industry had bothered to enquire about his health.

I sought permission from the doctors to meet Hrisihda. When his daughter-in-law went close to him and whispered into his ear in Bengali, 'Look who's here, Amol has come,' Hrishida, in a semi-conscious state, opened his eyes and smiled like a child.

I sat next to him and he held my hand very tightly. I talked to him for about 10 minutes, during which time he kept holding my hand and responded to my chatter, merely through his touch.

That childlike smile and that warm affectionate touch of his will be another treasure that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

As told to Sanjay Pendse

Great contribution.

http://www.samachar.com/showurl.htm?rur ... ,~father...

Gulzar remembers Hrishi-da: mentor, father and friend
By Subhash K. Jha, IANS
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Together they worked to bring to life some of Bollywood's most loved movies. "Anand", "Guddi", "Khubsoorat" and "Namak Haraam" are only some of the gems that Hrishikesh Mukherjee directed and Gulzar wrote the dialogues and the screenplay for.

Today, just a few days after Mukherjee's death, Gulzar remembers the late director and describes himself as his mentor's best pupil.

"Hrishi-da was the masterjee and I was one of his better students. Some of his most major works as director featured with me as his writer," Gulzar told IANS.

"Our first film together was 'Biwi Aur Makaan' for which Hemant Kumar sent me to Hrishi-da. It was the first film where even the dialogues were in song form.

"Hrishi-da was always playing around, kicking the ball around. He knew the medium so well. He started his directorial career with the experimental 'Musafir'. It had three separate stories in one film. He was so much ahead of his times."

Gulzar says Mukherjee pioneered the concept of parallel cinema.

"He started the trend of parallel cinema much before it actually started. His early films like 'Anari', 'Anuradha', 'Musafir' and 'Mem Didi' were not boy-girl stories.

"He often gave me literary short stories to adopt. He made 'Mem Didi', which has Jayant in the lead. 'Ashirwaad' had Ashok Kumar in the lead. And in 'Bawarchi' he cast Rajesh Khanna without a heroine. Jaya Bhaduri played his sister!"

He discloses that Kishore Kumar was Mukherjee's first choice for the main lead in "Anand", which turned out to be a landmark film in Rajesh Khanna's career.

"In 'Anand' Kishore was supposed to play the lead but he opted out at the last minute. I asked Rajesh if he'd be interested. He jumped at it. 'You take me to Hrishi-da.' Later Hrishi-da and I designed 'Mili' as the female version of 'Anand'."

Gulzar says that the 1970s were the golden period of his life as he ended up writing all of Mukherjee's movies.

"In the 1970s I virtually wrote all of Hrishi-da's films. It was the golden period of my life. We'd often argue about our scenes. But I always listened to what he said.

"I remember we had argued about a scene in 'Guddi'. Hrishi-da had wanted a dialogue, which I didn't. He was right. The audience broke into applause during that dialogue. I think I bloomed as a writer with Hrishi-da. Most of the time I wrote the screenplay and dialogues.

"In 'Guddi' I wrote the story as well. Among my lesser-known films for Hrishi-da were 'Alaap', 'Arjun Pandit' and 'Sabse Bada Sukh', which was a very innocent film about two young men who wanted to experience sex. It was not successful. In 'Namak Haraam' we had to change the end because Hrishi-da had promised Rajesh the death scene."

Gulzar says the maverick director had a good sense of humour and it was fun working with him.

"He had so many jokes to tell. Shooting with him was like a picnic. A few months back I met him. He had grown his beard. And he started telling his jokes.

"Nobody could make light-hearted film like Hrishi-da. 'Chupke Chupke', 'Golmaal', 'Khubsoorat' were all written by me. He made humorous films -- I won't demean them by calling them comedies-consistently. He was like my father. I'd run to him with my problems."

"Our first film together was 'Biwi Aur Makaan' for which Hemant Kumar sent me to Hrishi-da. It was the first film where even the dialogues were in song form.