Yahoo...Suku Suku

In the heart of political sensationalism and pouring rains, there was an incident of great import to people like me. The passing away of Shammi Kapoor was and will be a matter of sadness for me and millions of his fans elsewhere.
His contribution to coming of age is great. Greater than what Anna is doing and great than what Manmohan uncle unleashed in the 90s. Back in the 60s, before I was born, before my parents were married, there was this man…Fat, obnoxious and very good looking who went to town with his swagger and sexuality. In the days of Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar, here was a guy who was unabashedly different….extremely unconventional….very loud…very funny…..

He turned his lack of dance skills into a fine art, he made his stocky frame break into pieces, negating his fat with constant random motion…He made rock n roll mix with Bhangra…Desi style and he made his leading ladies go weak in their knees with one ill timed scream …..Yahoo….

I believe he gifted us Mohammed Rafi…in as much as Rajesh Khanna did Kishore Kumar.
When we were growing up, in college, up near and close with the opposite sex for the first time, it was their jugalbandi that gave us confidence. Sitting on the college steps belting out ‘Diwana Mujhsa Nahi’ with gullible feminine eyes looking at us, we so wanted to be him. We wanted to drive an outsized American car on thin mountain roads with brooks flowing by. We wanted to play drums the way that made our hair spray all over the place and dance the way that only un danced the floor…”Baar Baar Dekho Hazaar Baar Dekho” was pretty much the story of my first girlfriend. She was sucker to fall for it and I was not even a half decent singer.

And then there was the inevitably urbane and obviously sophisticated Sharmila in Kashmir Ki Kali…in a Kashmiri villagers dress (no less)….being romanced by a large if good looking man who couldn’t stand straight. He jumped into the Daal Lake and lip synched with passion that lent Mr Rafi a whole new dimension altogether…..An entire generation after the 60s, in the late 80s, Shammi Kapoor was still dictating the way we thought of romance.

It was not about candle lit dinners and long drives….It was that and much more. If the object passion showed too many nakhras even after the songs and the dinners and the long drives….you just did things the Shammi Kapoor way …… Yahoooo

It was not only when he was romancing them, but also when he was being romanced. His is the image that comes to mind when one thinks about a archetypal spoilt brat giving a tough time to his dearly beloved for some flaky reason or the other…So when Asha Parekh of the big behind and bigger eyes fame, sang Sona Re to a pouting Shammi Kapoor, we youngsters went into raptures…’that’s exactly how we want our GFs to behave’ ….. It was wow time. In a country where men never cried or pouted, it was Shammi’s pout and ready tears and general persona that defined the birth of the Indian Metrosexual. A persona that was not related to the overriding problems of the Indian diaspora, but a man who was and will be forever a symbol of urbane sophistication that is however rough around the edges….that can play a guitar and a drum and scream out loud when cornered …Yahoooooo. And this long before the 1990s when the word in question came into being.
Shammi Kapoor, Good morning. You are as alive as you were in the 60s. We are fast approaching the middle years and yet your voice still resonates in our ears and reverberates around the heart walls. Yahoo….Shammi (Once born…never dead)