Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna

If ever a life was meant to be a book, few could stake a stronger claim. Like a shooting star doomed to darkness after a glorious run, Rajesh Khanna spent the better half of his career in the shadow of his own stardom. Yet, five decades after his last monstrous hit, Khanna continues to be the yardstick by which every single Bollywood star is measured.

At a time when film stars were truly larger than life, Khanna towered above them all. He was the reason the word ‘superstar’ entered the Indian film lexicon.

With seventeen blockbuster hits in succession, starting with Aradhana (1969), and mass adulation rarely seen before or since, the world was at Khanna's feet. Everything he touched turned to gold. The hysteria he generated—women writing him letters in blood, marrying his photograph and donning white when he married Dimple Kapadia, people bringing sick children for his 'healing' touch after Haathi Mere Saathi (1971)—was unparalleled. Then, in a matter of months, it all changed. Khanna's career hit a downward spiral as spectacular as his meteoric rise, just three years after Aradhana, and from this he never really recovered.

Dark Star looks at the phenomenon of an actor who redefined the term 'film star'. Gautam Chintamani's engaging narrative tries to make sense of what it was that made Rajesh Khanna and what accounted for his extraordinary fall. A singular account of a glorious life that hasn't dimmed even years after the icon's demise.