B S Dara

Some stars shine bright. Others burn. And then there was Rajesh Khanna, the man who made India believe in love, longing, and loneliness, all at once.

From 1969 to 1972 was a time in India when the name Rajesh Khanna was a fever. He delivered 15 consecutive solo superhits, a feat untouched and unmatched. But his true triumph wasn’t just box office domination, it was the hysteria. A hysteria that curled like smoke through city streets, small-town talk, and teenage girls’ diaries. The kind of obsession only legends inherit and eventually get consumed by.

They called him “Kaka”, but he was far more than a nickname. Rajesh Khanna had become a national condition of the time.

In the alleys of Bandra and the studio lots of Bombay, stories of love letters and lipstick stained madness passed like sacred gossip: women wrote him letters in blood, married his photographs, queued outside his house to catch a blink of his shadow on a curtain. Khanna’s iconic white Impala wasn’t just a car, it was a moving temple. Fans would chase it barefoot, throw rose petals at it, worship it, and it was often left smeared with lipstick. The myth says it shimmered pink on some days. Some waited just to touch its door handle, believing it brought good luck. He later admitted in an interview, “I stopped getting out of the car sometimes. Just watched them from behind tinted windows. It scared me, how much they loved me.”

“It was not love. It was a sheer madness never experienced by anyone ever before. It was possession,” a foreign journalist once wrote.

Rajesh Khanna was a romance incarnate. His tilted nod, that slow blink, the wry smile, they weren’t performances. They were seductions. In an India still finding itself post-independence, his characters offered something rare, emotional permission. It was okay to ache, to lose, to cry.

Long before Twitter trends and Instagram reels, he commanded mass hysteria without a marketing manual. Think Beatlemania, but slower, deeper, more melancholic. If Elvis had the pelvis, Rajesh had the pause. That moment before a dialogue, when silence spoke louder than lines. His fans didn’t need to understand cinema, they just needed to understand him.

There are few analogies to match this. Perhaps Rudolph Valentino in the 1920s, whose death made women commit suicide. Or Shah Rukh Khan decades later, who inherited the gaze that Rajesh perfected. But even these comparisons fail to capture the fragile intimacy Rajesh offered. He wasn’t just adored; he was owned by his audience. And like all owned things, eventually, broken.

Rajesh Khanna is often said to be an actor who was a mood.What separated Khanna from the pack was that his aura could carry weak scripts. His presence was the plot. Directors say that on set, he wasn’t the most disciplined actor, but when the camera rolled, magic would happen. Not rehearsed. Not explained. Just… conjured.

Javed Akhtar, part of the legendary writer duo Salim-Javed, once called him “a product of hype.” That statement, sharp as it was, carried a grain of truth, but not the full picture. Rajesh Khanna was a storm that the system built and then failed to contain.

When offered the lead in Deewaar, he rejected it and walked out of a film tailor-made for his fallen-angel charm. He reportedly asked, “Why would the audience want to see me angry? They want to see me love.”But the irony? That single decision redirected Indian cinema. Deewaar was the kind of complex, layered script that could’ve redefined Khanna. Instead, it redefined someone else.That role went to Amitabh Bachchan, and Indian cinema turned. The romantic dreamer was replaced by the angry young man. India had changed. Rajesh hadn’t.

His fall wasn’t cinematic, it was Greek. Arrogance crept in. Directors whispered about erratic behavior, late arrivals, ego wars. The man who once had producers waiting in line began to see those lines thin out. He didn’t adapt, didn’t pivot. He believed the myth, and myths don’t know how to grow old.

There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, that when his films started flopping, he stood on his balcony and told the crowd, “Kaka ab bhi zinda hai.” (Kaka is still alive.) It was more a plea than a declaration.

His personal life mirrored his screen stories, romantic highs, tragic lows. His marriage to Dimple Kapadia, herself a symbol of youth and rebellion, began like a fairytale, ended like a press release. She was 16, he was 31. The nation sighed. The fairy dust wore off. But they never truly let each other go.

Rajesh Khanna was a man out of time. In later years, he became a phantom of his former glory. A man whose own shadow looked foreign to him. He dabbled in politics, delivered forgettable roles, but the magic… it had dimmed. He gave his final interviews seated under portraits of his younger self, as if even he needed reminders of who he once was.

And yet, when he passed in 2012, India mourned not just the man, but the era he carried. A time when love was slow, cinema was emotional, and stars weren’t just actors, they were alternate realities.

Rajesh Khanna gave us something no algorithm can generate, romantic loneliness. His films were not about boy meets girl, they were about boy loses girl, remembers her forever, and sings to the sky. He didn’t just act. He ached onscreen.

Today’s stars may trend globally, break streaming records, and sell brands, but they’ll rarely feel like a personal secret the way Rajesh did. His songs weren’t consumed. They were lived. His fans didn’t follow him. They belonged to him.

Rajesh Khanna was the first superstar and probably the last of his kind.

When Rajesh Khanna passed away in July 2012, Mumbai came to a hush. Streets in Juhu and Bandra choked with grieving fans. Floral tribute rained down like confetti from rooftops. But what lingered in memory was this: his last journey played “Zindagi kaisi hai paheli” from his movie Anand, a haunting loop of a man who had lived and died like a riddle. The loudspeakers screamed and wept. It felt like he had scripted his own exit scene.

He was called India’s first superstar not just because of ticket sales, but because of the psychological occupation he managed. For a few years, he was the air India breathed. And like all great obsessions, his fame devoured itself. But maybe that’s how legends are supposed to end, not with reinvention, but with reverence