When Kishore Kumar called Ameen Sayani ‘boring’; conducted his own interview: ‘Go sit in the corner’

However, in 1952, Sayani began hosting a show called Geetmala on the radio. He had to record the tapes and send them to Radio Ceylon (a radio station based out of Sri Lanka). For that, he had received audio bytes of Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi, but Kumar kept cancelling on him. “I was getting a bit cheesed off. Only 10 days were left for the tapes to be sent to Ceylon and I needed his inputs desperately. On being persistent, he asked me to come to a studio in the far-off suburbs,” Sayani recalled in a 2018 interview with Filmfare.

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Sayani reached the studio with his “giant” recorder, but what happened next made him stop pursuing Kumar for interviews for years. He narrated, “I was stopped by a producer at the gate. He said sheepishly, ‘Kishore called me to say that he’ll only come to the studio to shoot for my film after you’ve come and gone.’ I saw blood. I was hurt and broken. I made up my mind never to ask him for an interview again. I stopped meeting him.”

However, the tables turned in the 1960s. Kishore Kumar wanted Sayani to promote his films like Door Gagan Ki Chaon Mein (1964) and Door Ka Rahi (1971) on his radio programme. Once while hosting a radio show called Saridon Ke Saathi on Vividh Bharati, Sayani met Kumar as he came to promote Badti Ka Naam Dadi (1974). This time, Sayani made sure to interview Kumar and told him, “Didn’t you see two pehelwans (wrestlers) standing outside? They’ll beat you up if you don’t give me an interview.”

Shocked at Sayani’s behaviour, the actor-singer told him that he “bores” people and asked him to move aside as he would conduct his own interview. Sayani later admitted that this interview became the “best” interview of his career.

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Sayani remembered, “Go sit in the corner and let me conduct the interview. He went on to court martial himself, as Kishore the child, the youth and the adult. He levied charges on himself and also gave answers in his defence. He even played the judge in the voice of veteran Tiwari. This became the best interview of my career.”

Kishore Kumar began his acting career with the 1946 film Shikari, on the insistence of his brother Ashok Kumar, though he only wanted to make it big as a singer in the industry.