Bengali director Rituporno Ghosh who had not yet become the star of Bengal, was in Mumbai on that day of the book release and asked me if he could attend the event because he would like to see Amitabh Bachchan in person.
Ten years later, Rituporno Ghosh worked with Bachchan in The Last Lear and had he not gone away as suddenly as he did, the two would have probably made a few more films together.
The most distinguished guest in the audience that evening was Urdu poet Ali Sardar Jafri and his wife Sultana Jafri. Every time I see this picture, I want to kick myself that I did not invite him on stage to release my book. There could have been no bigger honour than to have the erstwhile poet release the book of the son of a poet but since this was my debut as an author, I was still not familiar with the ways of book publishing and hesitant to make suggestions.
On second thoughts, the book could have been jointly released by Bachchan’s three filmmakers (Yash Chopra, Prakash Mehra, Ramesh Sippy) in the audience but the nineties were an innocent decade when topline filmmakers were happy to be your guests with no expectations of spotlight.
Post the release, Bachchan waited and signed copies for readers. We were happy to see a long line of them to get their copies autographed until we discovered that all the display copies on the stands were missing.
That’s another lesson I learnt from the event, never ever display books at a launch because it is difficult to keep track of the copies.
To be continued