Musings of a mediocre mind — Tale of 2 celebs

Rajnish

I have been a mediocre mind and with nothing really special to my credit. However, I came into contact with two celebrities both of whom are now no more. Here goes their story.

The first one was one year junior to me in an engineering college (Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh). We became friends as we both were day scholars and were living in adjacent sectors (he in Sector 19 and I in Sector 20). Moreover, we both were pursuing a degree in electrical engineering and had many common friends. He had an uncommon funny bone from the very beginning. Once he along with six-seven college friends went to Panjab University’s cafeteria known as Student Centre. There no one was placing the order fearing that doing so would entail footing the bill too. He then broke the ice, called the waiter to bring a plate of saambar with seven spoons.  It so happened that whenever I came across a bawdy joke, I would develop an irresistible itch to tell the same to one and all. Even to this day I have not been able to overcome/suppress this urge. Once I cracked one such joke to many a common friend individually and finally to him also.

He began telling the same joke to the same set of common friends. Before he could utter the first sentence each one told him that he already had heard the joke from Rajnish. Ultimately, he started narrating it to one last common friend, namely JS Pathania, who himself had told this to me. When Pathania also told him that he already heard the joke from me, he exasperatedly said to Pathania, “Oh salaa vee na jok da middh ee kaddh denda ae” (that bugger makes a pulp/mincemeat of a joke).

 When he had become quite a celebrity, I met him with pleasant surprise after a long gap in Shimla where I was then posted and he had come on a pleasure trip about a decade back. After a tight hug and a few strolls of The Mall we sat in Baljees restaurant for remembering old times. Even then I could not help telling him two-three risque jokes, but could not make out whether he appreciated them or not from his dead pan expression. He was none other than celebrated inimitable humourist Jaspal Bhatti whose life unfortunately was cut short in a tragic accident. I feel that he was a unique satirist of his own kind who was head and shoulders above the comedians of the times/time.

I got hooked to rather I fell in love with the second one when I was in eighth standard and he was the editor of the now, long defunct magazine. I had been reading him since then. On his describing a meeting with Dalai Lama as the most rewarding experience of the year about 30 years ago, when I was serving in a  Hydel  Station, I found that quite ironic since he was a self-professed agnostic if not an atheist. I shot a casual letter without exact address to him stating the reasons why I liked and not so liked his writings. I got a prompt reply on a printed post card. I was really impressed for he cared to reply to the likes of me and then started a long correspondence which lasted almost till his death during which I sent him dirty jokes mainly. He enjoyed them enormously. On my asking who amongst his innumerable readers had amused him the most, his reply was – you are the best of the jokers. He wrote this perhaps to flatter me as was his wont. I was overjoyed nonetheless.  I, in a lighter vein, had the audacity to call him purveyor of sex and other names in a few letters of mine. 

Two or so months before his death in March 2014 at 99 plus, when he was not keeping good health, he wrote this line in then one of his intermittent syndicated columns: ‘Yaa rabb tere bandon se uqtaa gayaa hoon main’ (O God I am fed up with your people/human beings). I was moved and touched to read it. I don’t know who originally wrote these words, perhaps Ghalib or he himself.

 In a way, he was my soul mate, he a celebrity and I, a non-entity. He was the famous and controversial journalist author Khushwant Singh. I have kept his over 60 post cards written to me as a family heirloom. I met him thrice in a span of a decade and can say with honest heart that no man ever I met possessed such child-like innocence as the celebrated dirty old man of letters 

 (The writer is a resident of Kiari village, Tara Devi , Shimla)