UNLIKELY HERO OM PURI

BY NANDITA PURI (ROLI BOOKS, 208 PAGES, Rs 395)

You wonder why this book was ever written. That's not because it's a book which is so terrible that it shouldn't have seen the light of day; but because it's a biography written by a wife about a husband. The thought makes you squirm, but obviously Om and Nandita Puri are made of sterner stuff.

Because of their shared intimacy you get an entirely new genre of biography: the authorised tell?all book. Om Puri was aghast that the media ? particularly television ? had picked up the more prurient bits of his story to give the impression that it is a salacious account of a life which the book clearly is not. But he should have known this would happen: Breaking News is not about ?Actor Prepares for a Role'; it is about ?Om Puri Lost His Virginity to Much Older Maid'.

That naiveté in the nicest sense is, perhaps, Om Puri's trade?mark. In spite of being in the big, bad world of films for so many years, he retains a certain innocence, an absence of malice that is very rare indeed. It is this quality that Patrick Swayze (now tragically gone from our midst) so touchingly describes in his Foreword.

Unlikely Hero gives us an unblinkered view of a remarkable life. When you read about the actor's early life and all the handicaps and obstacles he had to overcome, your respect for his achievements goes up even further. What the book lacks is a serious analysis of his work. The chapter in which the actor himself writes about his films is sketchy at best. Surely one of our best ever actors deserves an exhaustive delineation of his craft. We will have to wait for another book for that.

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HERO. VOLUME I. THE SILENT ERA TO DILIP KUMAR

BY ASHOK RAJ (HAY HOUSE, 406 PAGES, RS. 595)

HERO. VOLUME II. AMITABH BACHCHAN TO THE KHANS AND BEYOND

BY ASHOK RAJ (HAY HOUSE, 417 PAGES, RS. 595).

If Om Puri is an Unlikely Hero, the men featured in this book are likely heroes. Ashok Raj, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, has written a monumental two volume series which looks at the evolution of the Hindi film actor ? always called ?Hero'- from the inception of movies to the present day.

The two heroes of Hero are undoubtedly Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan. They not only represent different eras but also different styles of acting. But they do more than that: because cinema ? even Bollywood ? reflects the concerns of a time and place, each of these superstars and their phenomenal popularity represents the state of the nation when they were at their peak. You couldn't have had Bachchan in Dilip Kumar's time or Dilip Kumar in Bachchan's time. Any society, especially a developing society, is always in a state of flux but even then each period has a dominant concern and the characters Kumar and Bachchan portrayed, express that concern.

Ashok Raj's approach takes in both the microcosm and the macrocosm. He looks at individual actors, giving the more important ones more space (K K Saigal, for example, gets his due), but through the persona of the actor and his acting style, Raj also portrays the evolution of Hindi cinema. And since Bollywood has always been hero ? centric, the two volumes add up to a kind of history of Hindi cinema, in which producers, directors, writers, musicians and others too flit in and out.

Ashok Raj has a tendency to get academic at times, but his research has been prodigious, so he often producers unknown nuggets of information which keeps his story moving at the pace of a Hindi film.