Rolling back the years

MARQUEE

It's widely known that the ages of some film stars are as difficult to pin down as those of Pakistani cricketers. It's nearly impossible to get reliable information on the years of birth for some Indian film personalities.

The only cases where you can be absolutely sure are with dynasties such as the Kapoor khandan, or with star children (Sanjay Dutt, Saif Ali Khan) of parents who were already famous at the time of their birth.

It's not that the information isn't available, it's more that it keeps changing. Trawling the usual websites with actor profiles (IMDB, Wikipedia, Upperstall.com), it's entertaining to watch the number-fudging patterns that emerge, and to speculate who might be doing the tampering (the celeb's personal PR minions?). Some observations:

l Number-fudging occurs more often with performers who had ultra-glamorous images during their heyday. With actresses like Raakhee, Jaya Bhaduri and even Hema Malini, sticking to one date of birth was never a problem "" in fact, growing old gracefully became a feather in their matronly buns.

But it's quite different for, say, Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi. It's a matter of biographical record that both these ladies had a full formal education; at the very least, each of them finished college before she went anywhere near a movie camera.

But if you look at their official birth dates (Parveen's was widely reported as 1955 after her death last year) and then their filmographies, you'd have to think they were 14 or 15 when they were shooting their first films.

Typically, the alterations start to happen when a personality is about to encounter an undesirable milestone birthday.

Shatrughan Sinha, for instance, has been on a desperate mission to avoid hitting the unmentionable S-I-X-T-Y for some time now; his official year of birth has changed from 1941 through 1945 and 1946, and is currently showing as 1948 on Wikipedia (though amusingly, it still says "1945 births" in the Categories section at the bottom of the page).

In Bollywood, actresses are not permitted to be even a couple of years older than the actors they have been successfully paired with (because that could only make them their bhabhis).

Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla have both had hits with each of the three Khan heroes (who were all verifiably born in 1965), which could be one reason why both actresses have their official DOBs as late 1967.

This is more than a little risible given that
(a) Juhi won the Miss India contest in early 1984 and (b) Madhuri made her film debut with Abodh in 1983.

I remember a magazine quote from one of Ms Dixit's Class 12 teachers who said she used to wrinkle her nose at Hindi cinema. Quite a double life that, to be making such statements in front of classmates and then scooting off to a film set for dhak-dhak after school was out.

The amusing thing about these charades is the selective amnesia involved: the tampering of ages as if they exist in a vacuum and don't have any bearing on the past.

All that matters is the here and now: this actor is only 35 today and that's all you're expected to know; you're not supposed to remember that he was dancing around trees and beating up goons 30 years ago.

It puts me in mind of the old wives' tale about a much-married Hollywood diva who kept removing years from her portfolio until one day her press agents discovered that she was now officially younger than her eldest son.

Fortunately it didn't make much difference in this case since the son wasn't a public figure himself (ironically, he was an accountant) "" and so the deception continued apace until the actress died of natural causes, still a couple of years older than her eldest grandchild.

jaiarjun@gmail.com