The fact that I approached him without anybody’s recommendation really pleased BR Chopra

After a brief intro, I showed him some of my pictures and asked him if I could be of any use to him. While BR was looking at the prints, I was looking at his face, and to me he looked very pleased

Picture Talk/By NK Sareen

I had become a great admirer of BR Chopra since the day I first saw his film, the classic Naya Daur. That was the time I had just about entered my teens. Films had always fascinated me, right from my childhood, and seeing or meeting a great filmmaker in my teens was like a dream come true.

My interest and fascination with films took me to Bombay (as it was called then), or Bollywood, where the Hindi film industry was based in, very early in my career. Those days I used to spend most of the year in Bombay, as the majority of the top and best magazines and film weeklies also had their offices in that city.

If I can recollect correctly, it was sometime in 1975 that I got hold of BR Chopra’s phone number and straightaway dialled the B R Films office. His secretary was kind enough to let me talk to her boss. Within a moment it was BR Chopra who was on the line. After telling him my name and my profession, I asked him if he could spare some time to meet me. He asked me to come the next day.

The next day, on reaching the office at the appointed time, Mr. Chopra’s secretary told me he needed to go out urgently but had decided to stay back as he didn’t want to miss his appointment with me. I was quickly led into a large office room where Mr. Chopra was sitting. That was the first time I was face-to-face with the man I had admired for so many years. After a brief intro, I showed him some of my pictures and asked him if I could be of any use to him. While BR was looking at the prints, I was looking at his face, and to me he looked very pleased.

After going through my pictures, Mr. Chopra said, “I’m very pleased to see your work and that you came to me on the basis of your work, without anybody’s recommendation.”

He further told me he was shooting two films, Karm and The Burning Train, which were scheduled to be shot in Dehradun, Chandigarh, and Delhi in the near future. He asked me if I had the time and if I was willing to accompany his units. He also proposed that all the black-and-white and color film stock needed for taking stills during those shoots were be provided by his company, and all my travel, accommodation and related expenses would either be taken care of by his production or would be reimbursed if I paid for them myself.

Before I left, he told me he already had one person on his staff who did film stills for his films, but he was highly dissatisfied with his work. He told me he was keeping him only because he was his classmate in Lahore and had promised not to fire him, but he wanted me to come to Bombay as the head of his lab because he was so pleased with my work. He wanted me to improve the quality of his film stills. He said he had brought two large format Linhof cameras from Germany, which had been lying unused for years, which he would give me to use when I was head of his lab.

Finally, he asked me to promise him to keep it confidential and not share anything with anyone about our discussion that day.

[In this column, ‘Picture Talk’, veteran photo journalist NK Sareen, a former Photo Editor at Expanse International and a writer, shines light on some of the pictures of personalities he has clicked over the years, with a touch of nostalgia. The views expressed here are the author’s own and The News Porter bears no responsibility for the same.]