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Fame and fortune always attracted a certain kind of people and back in the 1940s, when being a movie star was one of the only ways of getting famous and living a glamorous life, it attracted young boys and girls from all over the country. Dev Anand was one of those people, as he decided to move to Bombay (now Mumbai) from Lahore with just Rs 30 in his pocket, all because he wanted to become a movie star.
This was the era when the understanding of cinema was still in its nascent stage so when someone expressed their wish to be a star, it didn’t have much to do with their acting abilities. It was assumed that a charming, good-looking person would be fit for the silver screen and while Dev’s ambitions started with being a learned man in England, they eventually landed him in a place where he got much more than he could have ever imagined. In his memoir, Romancing with Life, Dev shared that he had eight siblings and while his father wanted to give them all a great education, he couldn’t achieve it completely as fell upon hard times by the time Dev grew up.
Dev shared that his father “had no money to spend on the luxury of his third son going for higher studies, and suggested a clerical job for me in a bank, after I got rejected for a commission in the Royal Indian Navy of the British Armed Forces.” Dev had finished his education from the Government College in Lahore, and found it beneath his to start in this position, and so, he decided to move to Bombay to try his luck in the movies with “thirty rupees and a small bag of my most precious personal belongings.”
Dev was unemployed and at times, “on the borderline of starvation” as he sought a break for himself in the world of movies. He went from studio to studio in the hopes of catching someone’s attention and sang popular songs to entertain those who worked at the film studios. At this point, Dev was living on the mercy of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas but realised that this wasn’t a sustainable plan, and he was also starting to feel like he was imposing on the writer. So, he decided to move out, and live in a chawl.
Dev was struggling financially and so, he decided to sell the last precious thing he owned, his stamp collection, for just Rs 30. Dev moved in with three roommates at a chawl named Krishna Niwas in Parel, and when his brother Chetan Anand moved to the city, he too, moved in with them, before he found himself an accommodation at the then sparsely populated area of Bandra. With no money left, he decided to pick up a job he had run away from in Lahore. He became a clerk at an accountancy firm and while he was getting paid Rs 85 per month, he found this to be a “humiliating proposition”. He hated the job and left before they could fire him.
His next job was at the censorship department of the British government where they employed educated youth to scan through the letters of the Army personnel. He stayed at this job for a while and eventually, started makig Rs 165 per month, which made him appear like a rich man, a least in his group.
But even this didn’t stick as it came in the way of his Bollywood dreams. Dev recaleld inhis memoi that one day, as he was reading through one of those letters, he read how an Indian Army man had written to his wife, “I wish I could chuck this job right now and rush straightaway into your arms.” In that moment, he left his job and walked out. Just a week later, Dev landed his first opportunity at the movies, and never looked back.
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