Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
The industry showered nothing but love on Rishi Kapoor when he died in 2020, but by his own admission, he had his ‘share of scrapes‘ over the years. He recalled anecdotes about his ‘flare-ups and fights’ in his autobiography Khullam Khulla, published in 2017.
He dedicated an entire chapter to this, and opened it with a story about an altercation with Sanjay Khan that ‘could’ve ended in a police case’. The Khans of Juhu and the Kapoors had shared a close bond, he wrote, but the relationship between the two Bollywood families came close to falling apart when one evening, Rishi and Sanjay got into a violent altercation at a party thrown by Parmeshwar Godrej at a Chinese restaurant.
Rishi wrote that he doesn’t remember how the argument began, but he suspected that it could’ve been because he spoke up in favour of Jeetendra, who was a rival of Sanjay’s, or he could’ve been because he simply ‘behaved obnoxiously’. Either way, whatever he did or said infuriated Sanjay to the point that he hurled a full glass of alcohol at his face. Rishi wrote that he narrowly escaped injury, but was left with a cut. “But I was furious. He was an actor himself and knew the extent to which our faces are our fortune. But he still threw a glass at me from a very short distance. It could have damaged my eye permanently or disfigured my face,” he wrote.
The next day, Sanjay apologised profusely, as did his wife Zarine, and Rishi decided against filing a police complaint. “However, it is hard for me to entirely put the incident out of my mind. No matter who was in the wrong, you don’t just fling a glass at someone’s face. Most definitely not at a fellow actor because, for us, our physical appearance is our rozi-roti,” he added.
But even though he’d decided to move on from the incident, his family wasn’t so keen on rekindling their relationship with the Khans. “It was a brawl that greatly upset both families, including Feroz Khan, my dad, my brothers and my uncles. My mother, who has seen plenty of drunken brawls, thought that Sanjay’s behaviour was unacceptable. It was also dangerous. If I had lodged a police complaint, he would have been arrested on the spot,” he wrote. But whenever he met Sanjay afterwards, he was greeted with nothing but love and affection, he wrote.
Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
