For an evening billed as Kuch Yaden Kuch Nagme, actor Asha Parekh sat down with Nagpur-based celebrity chef Vishnu Manohar at Shivaji Nagar Garden on Thursday. The conversation, part of the Shivaji Maharaj Kruti Samiti’s Deepsandhya programme on the first day of Diwali, placed memory at the centre: hundreds of residents gathered for a mix of conversation and live performances drawn from Parekh’s filmography.
That framing matters. Hindi cinema’s golden era is often treated as a greatest-hits reel, but events like this make it an oral record, with the actor present to correct, complicate and humanise the films the audience already knows.
The songs, and why she thinks they last
Asked about older music’s hold on younger listeners, Parekh pointed to the 1970s and 1980s and said the songs endure “because they had a soul”, according to her remarks at the event. The programme then made the case for her: performers returned to numbers such as Parde Mein Rehne Do, Jaiye Aap Kahan Jayenge and Yeh Shaam Mastani, which carried the evening from interview to musical tribute.
She also had a specific connection to the city. Two of her aunts were married in Nagpur, she recalled, and while she said the city has changed, her memory of it remains “a beautiful and peaceful place with very little traffic”. She credited Nagpur audiences with continuing to nurture classical music and keeping it alive for younger generations.
Behind the Jubilee Queen title
Parekh, long known as the Jubilee Queen, spoke less about the rewards of stardom than about the working conditions that sat behind them. She described early shoots without vanity vans or basic facilities, and said actors often waited for hours, sometimes an entire day, for access to a washroom. That detail, she suggested, is how the era should be remembered: not simply by its songs and costumes, but by the labour that produced them.
One incident illustrated the gap between the screen image and the working reality. She said that during the making of Ziddi, she became friendly with an elephant belonging to the Gemini Circus, so much so that it would not share even the food she offered with its mahout.
She also clarified a rumour from her early years. When her eyes appeared red on set, she said, some suspected intoxication; the actual cause was the powerful reflectors used for lighting, which strained her eyes and made it hard to look straight ahead.
What a Diwali event adds to the archive
- Live song selections gave the audience a way to hear the films, not just be told about them.
- Parekh’s family history tied a Bombay-based star to a smaller city’s memory.
- Her set stories corrected nostalgia with the material conditions of early Hindi production.
For audiences that follow Hindi cinema as a continuing record, the value of such an evening is in the details that only a participant can provide. The songs may be familiar, but the account of how they were shot, and under what constraints, is fragmentary. Events with veterans, recorded and remembered locally, help fill that file before it is lost.
Source: thehitavada.com
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