'While shooting the Don song, Chandra Barot ordered 30-40 paans and insisted Amitabh Bachchan eat them all.'
Chandra Barot, the director of the cult film Don, passed into the ages on July 20.
Rediff Senior Contributor Roshmila Bhattacharya remembers Manoj Kumar's timely advice to the director that contributed to the film's phenomenal success and Pran's tip that helped him kick what was becoming an increasingly unhealthy habit.
Read on to know just what it was.
The ever-punctual Pran
Don immortalised Chandra Barot.
All his life, and even after his demise, the director's name will be synonymous with the 1978 action thriller which had Amitabh Bachchan in a dashing double role and Zeenat Aman's as his 'junglee billi' Roma.
Om Shivpuri plays the villain, the double-faced Vardaan, and Helen, in a special appearance, leaves a lasting impression as Kamini, who tries to honey trap Don with the seductive Yeh Mera Dil Pyar Ka Deewana so Iftehkar's DSP D'Silva can nab the gang lord who killed her fiancé.
Pran had a strong supportive role, as Jasjeet aka JJ.
Speaking to this writer for her book Bad Men: Bollywood's Iconic Villains, Barot recalled how, during a three-week schedule of Don at Mumbai's Chandivali Studio, Pran did not arrive late even once.
"In fact, he would reach 10 minutes before call time, which was 9 am, dressed in his costume, with his make-up on, making the rest of us hurry," he laughed.
They were filming on the set of a graveyard, and the light would change in the afternoon, with the trees casting long shadows.
"I would shoot with Pransaab till 2 pm, after which, much to his delight, I let him go, even though it was a 9 am to 6 pm shift, shooting with Amitabh from 2 pm to 6 pm, an arrangement that suited both of them," Barot added.
By the time Don arrived, the Bachchan-Pran team was a huge crowd-puller, after Zanjeer, Majboor and Amar Akbar Anthony.
The senior actor forfeited half of his Rs 5 lakh remuneration, and even Bachchan, Zeenat and Barot took a cut for their friend and the film's producer, Nariman Irani.
Irani was in the red, following the debacle of his 1972 debut production, Zindagi Zindagi, a remake of Tapan Sinha's 1959 Bengali film, Khoniker Atithi.
Don's Bharat connection
It was Manoj Kumar who had advised Irani, his Shor and Roti Kapda Aur Makaan cinematographer, to get a script from Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, whose names on the poster were enough to sell a film, and make a second film to recover his losses.
"I told him he could take my assistant Chandra Barot as the director and spoke to Amitabh and Zeenat, who were working with me in Roti Kapda Aur Makaan and they agreed to act in his film," Mr Bharat shared.
Barot, who had assisted Manoj Kumar on nine films, when taking the first shot -- which has Don using Kamini as a human shield to get away from the cops -- admitted that he had initially adopted his mentor's style of film-making.
But after the take, Irani, who was Don's cinematographer too, complained that the shot was too long, taking the focus away from Helen's beautiful face.
That prompted Barot to adopt a distinctive style of his own that gave the film a breathless pace and a buzzing energy.
Don, based on a script rejected by Dharmendra, Jeetendra and Dev Anand, was a blockbuster.
Unfortunately, Irani died in an accident brought on by a cloudburst, six months before the film's release on May 12, 1978.
After its success, his widow cleared all his debts.
Band, baaja and Banaraswala
Don was screened for Dilip Kumar, with whom Barot was planning a film which eventually did not materialise, and he praised the film to Manoj Kumar, his Kranti director and co-star.
Mr Bharat was miffed that his assistant director had not shown him the film and Barot immediately obliged.
After watching it, Manoj Kumar suggested they add a couple of songs to lighten up the intense drama and break the relentless action, particularly in the second half, giving the audience a chance to take a washroom break too without the fear of missing anything.
One of these songs is the evergreen chartbuster, Khaike Paan Banaraswala, which turned out to be the film's USP.
Lyricist Anjaan had written the song for the Dev Anand starrer, Banarasi Babu.
The film's composer duo, Kalyani-Anandji, recorded Hamara Naam Banarasi Babu with Kishore Kumar instead for Shankar Mukherjee's 1973 film, incorporating Khaike Paan Banarasiwala in Don later.
Barot revealed years later that Anandji was his neighbour and he would often run into the music director late at night when he was returning home from his shoots and Anandji from his recordings.
"Invariably, his lips were red from the betel juice of the paans he had been chewing all day," the director reminisced.
The image stayed with him, and while shooting the Don song, he ordered 30-40 paans and insisted Bachchan eat them all.
"The next day, his mouth was burning from all the chuna (lime) in the paans and he couldn't speak. So we got him paan without chuna," Barot recounted, adding that even Kishore Kumar had eaten a lot of paans during the recording to get the feel right.
After the film's release, the band bajawallahs would play Yeh Mera Dil and Khaike Paan Banaraswallah at weddings on popular demand.
Even at concerts abroad, Bachchan would enter to the tunes of Main Hoon Don and the curtains would come down with Khaike Paan Banaraswala.
A tale of cutting chai
Incidentally, it was during the shoot of Don that Pran, a father figure, helped Barot cut down on what was increasingly becoming an unhealthy habit.
The director would drink at least a dozen glasses of tea every day, and when the senior actor noticed this, he called Barot's Man Friday and instructed him to serve his boss only half a glass every time he called for chai.
"He told me the tongue tastes only for the first 30 seconds and the taste lingers for a minute, after that, the tea is nothing but hot water, so it is best to cut your intake by half," he suggested.
One recalled the advice later when Amjad Khan's wife Shehla revealed that while her husband, another of Bollywood's iconic villains, didn't eat much, he loved sweets like gulab jamun, rasgulla and chocolates.
After returning home from a late night shoot, he would wave off her offer of dinner, but would hunt out the bars of chocolate she had hidden away and finish them off.
"Then there was the chai, around 30-40 cups of over-sweetened tea that he would drink all day, every day," she sighed.
They added to the weight the actor put on when frequent falls were followed by long periods when he couldn't exercise which brought on his untimely demise.
Chandra Barot, according to his wife Deepa, had been battling pulmonary fibrosis for the past seven years, but he lived on till he was 86.
He passed away on July 20 and as one recalled the man, one could hear the echoes of 'Yaaron ka jo yaar hoon, yaari mein jo jaan luta de, main hoon vahi, main hoon vahi' resonate long into the night.
Barot was not a Don, no way, but he gave us a Don jisse pakadna mushkil hi nahin namumkin hai.
Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff
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