Basuda, as he is fondly known, had formed an informal triumvirate with his peers Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Gulzar in the seventies and eight...
Basuda, as he is fondly known, had formed an informal triumvirate with his peers Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Gulzar in the seventies and eighties. In those decades of multi-star cast, formula-driven films, they defied the trend with a homely ‘middle-of-the-road’ approach. After probing marital disillusionment in his sensitive debut film Sara Akash [Clear Skies], he took a charming detour with Rajnigandha and Chhoti Si Baat and a few years later turned so prolific that it prompted Hrishikesh Mukherjee to ask him to “take it easy” in an article he penned for, the now defunct film monthly, Star & Style.
Perhaps Basuda never read that article. He was, however, honest enough to admit that it was the lure of money that made him jump on the television bandwagon. His caricaturing ability [he was a cartoonist in the weekly tabloid Blitz] stood him in good stead. And that’s what made him doodle the character of Rajni. Rajni, interestingly, was initially designed on the lines of the popular American series Here’s Lucy!, a housewife who stumbled her way through problems, largely of her own making.
In 1984, the pilot episode was filmed with movie star Padmini Kolhapure playing Rajni. But when she was faced with the “horror of an episode a week”, she quit because it meant...
