Asha Bhonsle often noticed that Kishoreda would come for a recording in the company of an invisible boy. “This non-existent child and Kishoreda used to talk to each other continuously, at times cracking jokes and breaking into laughter... While alternating between himself and this invisible child, Kishoreda would invite me to join their conversation,” she recounted. “Frankly, I could never make head nor tail of what was going on and always excused myself.” Was this then the child in Kishore Kumar who never grew up? The flip side of creativity is eccentricity - and nobody exemplifies it more than Kishore Kumar! Multifaceted as he was, a singer from the soul, a reluctant actor, a filmmaker, writer, musician and composer, there was a flip side to the iconic impresario. He was often perceived to be a madman, a miser and a Casanova. In fact, the boy, whose coarse grating voice was taunted by his elders, became the voice of almost every top Hindi film hero…Displacing not only the greats, Mukesh, Mohammed Rafi and Manna Dey at the time, but ruling as the indisputable king of playback for nearly two decades! Apart from his unique voice with its distinct depth, Kishore Kumar had the rare ability to enact his songs. The secret, as R.D. Burman reveals, was that Kishore would undergo a complete personality change to fit the persona of the actor. When Shakti Samanta signed Rajesh Khanna for Aradhana, Kishore interviewed the new boy and then abruptly dismissed him. He was actually making notes about Rajesh Khanna’s mannerisms and voice. When he heard ‘Mere sapno ki rani kab ayegi tu…’, Rajesh Khanna exclaimed, “I felt like I had sung it myself!” That was the magic of Kishore Kumar…Songs that came alive with the richness of his voice and the colours of his personality, which made every song a living entity. Contrary to the light-hearted image Kishore portrayed, he was a lover of learning and had studied and imbibed intently the singing styles of gurus like Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, K.L. Saigal, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and the styles of Rabindra Sangeet. But as an actor, Kishore was a bag of trouble. As Kishore himself explained, “Why should I have bothered when I did not want to be an actor in the first place? I only wanted to sing. But I was conned into acting and I hated every moment of it. I tried virtually every trick possible to get out of it - I muffed my lines, pretended to be crazy, shaved my head off, played difficult, began yodeling in the midst of tragic scenes, told Meena Kumari what I was supposed to tell Bina Rai in some other film - but they would not let me go. I screamed, ranted, and went cuckoo. But who cared? They were just determined to make me a star because I was Dadamoni's brother. And he was a great star.” Despite this reluctance and rebelliousness, his performances were still unforgettable. They were actually an extension of his real self-the innate Kishore Kumar. Funny and frolicsome, serious or sombre, the many moods of the man were always visible. The truth was Kishore was a law unto himself, who could not be influenced by anybody. Hrishikesh Mukherji recognised this essential quality. “You cannot compel Kishore to act if he does not want to. That would have an adverse effect on his performance. He does not even stick to the script!” Gulzar narrates another anecdote about Kishore’s eccentric ways. Director Arbind Sen, after explaining the camera position, asked Kishore to drive along a certain path and then go out of the frame. When the shot was picturised, Kishore was compliance itself and drove the car down as directed, but continued to drive never to return! After a while, the director got a call to say that he had reached Panvel and if the shot was okay. Angered by this frivolity Sen asked for an explanation for Kishore’s erratic behaviour. Pat came the reply, “Since you did not say cut, I continued driving!” This switching between the serious and the frivolous was often seen as a schizophrenic tendency but it might just have been a defense mechanism he had perfected to protect his privacy. However, his mood swings, his eccentricities and his total unpredictability were undeniable. As was his hatred of being controlled. “Directors are like schoolteachers. Do this. Do that. Do not do this. I dreaded them. And then they said I used to give them a lot of trouble! They gave me trouble! You think they gave a damn for me? I mattered to them only because I was saleable,” he grinned. This perhaps explains his hatred for acting, which he thought, was ‘fake’ - unlike singing which came from the heart. Quite by intent he spread a very eccentric image of himself and to support it, often behaved in a manner that could only be described as neurotic. >>>>> 2