The lucky one to enter the super star’s ‘private den’

Photo journalist recalls the superstar telling him that he allowed nobody, not even his family members, to enter this room, and that he was the first outsider he had ever allowed in!

Picture Talk/By NK Sareen

Amitabh Bachchan at home and in his ‘Private Den’, as he referred to his personal room, this picture was taken while doing a cover feature on him, titled ‘One Man Industry’. This was the first feature on Amitabh done by the India Today magazine. This image was taken on Kodachrome film with available light filtering through a small window in that room, with a very fast wide-angle lens and slow shutter.

It was sometime in the early eighties when I was working for India Today and its sister publication, Bombay City Magazine, and was based in Bombay. I was asked to do the cover picture of Amitabh for India Today.

In those days Amitabh was known as the Angry Young Man, and was not meeting or allowing any camera people on the sets or anywhere else to shoot his pics. When the resident editor of Bombay City Magazine, who was entrusted to do the cover story on him, asked permission to photograph him, Amitabh’s curt reply to him was, “I will have them sent to you.”

However, the resident editor told me that when he mentioned my name to him, Amitabh immediately agreed, as he fondly recalled the photo-feature of my work in Debonair. So, my work in a different publication had given me effortless access to Amitabh for shooting the cover and other pictures for India Today.

While in his ‘Private Den’, Amitabh told me he didn’t allow even his family members to enter this room, and that I was the first outsider he had ever allowed in!

I spent about 5-6 hours shooting extensively in his palatial bungalow, and I also shot pictures of his father, Dr Harivansh Rai Bachchan, and his mother, Teji Bachchan.

As a schoolboy I had corresponded with Amitabh’s father, who was a well-known Hindi poet, and I still have a few of his letters, which are a precious treasure to me. Without ever knowing that a child was writing to him, Dr Harivansh Rai Bachchan always addressed me as ‘bhai’. All his letters were in pure Hindi handwriting on printed post cards/envelopes, and he responded promptly to each without fail. I always received his replies in two or three days by mail. The first time I met him in person, many years later, it was at his legendary son’s bungalow, for the India Today feature. In my excitement, I forgot to mention that I was the same schoolboy with whom he had exchanged a few letters.

[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.]