The part of India from which I hail there are not many Sardars. When I say Sardar, I mean the turban wearing ones. I still remember how my father narrated to me the fact that it had taken him all of 21+ years of his life to even lay eyes on one and that to, when he be-friended a Sardar pursuing a degree in English literature, he couldn't hold back his curiosity and enquire as to why his friend had not been in the Army!!! Ofcourse no offense was meant and needless to say none was taken and the Sardar as you would have guessed laughed it off with a twinkle in his eye!!!
In my life however cosmopolitan I may proclaim to be, I must confess that I never really got around being buddies with Sardars. Well I can say there were 2-3 at school and maybe 1 at work back in Pune, but thats all. Now I find it weird that I couldn't get around making friends with some of the friendliest folks in India and I will definitely say it was a lack of opportunity more than anything else. To this day I fondly remember my father enquiring if there were any Sardars at the engg collg I attended and to this day I remember just seeing one on campus and he too was in the Masters program.
All the above blabbering apart, I did grow up watching quite a few Sardars in my lifetime. Notable among those being : Navjot Singh Sindhu, Harbhajan Singh, Sunny Deol (his characther in Border ;)) and last but not the least Jaspal Bhatti.
Well I must say that Jaspal Bhatti remains the first Sardar whom I saw and remember seeing on TV. It had to be 1990-91 and I was visiting my uncle in Ahmedabad for Diwali. On his black-n-white TV I remember coming face to face with this guy. I was too young to appreciate his satire at that point in time (I was only 6-7 yrs old then) but then his image has stayed with me since. I think the fact that his show was called Flop Show was one reason why I remembered the name and got around seeing it again when I was old enough to understand. Since then I have run and rerun every episode of that epic show.
Flop Show arguably still remains the only satirical show to be run on Indian television. Even the gamut of cable channels which invaded the TV soon after could not deliver a single satirical show in my knowledge and for that I salute the genius of Jaspal Bhatti.
His death in a road mishap was both sudden and most unfortunate. However he has been more than immortalized in our minds and hearts!!! Jaspal Bhatti you were the first friend I made from across the CRT of our TV. RIP!!!
As an afterthought I still feel that he will have a satirical joke to crack through his garlanded photo hanging up on the wall. You will be missed!!!
2 comments:
u forgot MMS
haha..speaks a lot about how irrelevant he has become ;)
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