Happy Birthday Mahesh Bhatt: Unapologetic Storyteller Who Was Way Ahead Of His Time

It was on September 20, 1948, that Mahesh Bhatt was born to a single Muslim mother Shirin Mohammad Ali.

Fifty years later, it inspired Bhatt to make ‘Zakhm’ — a story of an illegitimate child growing up in the backdrop of communal tensions.

It was just one of several personal miseries, shortfalls and complications that he faced in his life which Bhatt expressed through his films.

He was always blunt about what life threw at him, and never made apologies or expressed regret.

In 1982, Bhatt made ‘Arth’ starring Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi and Kulbhushan Kharbanda which took the Mumbai film industry by storm with an unconventional narrative dealing with the issues of male chauvinism and women’s independence.

As Bhatt recalls, ‘Arth’ was a reflection of his extramarital affair with Parveen Babi when his first marriage with Kiran Bhatt was breaking apart. The voids in life, Bhatt believed, could be filled with the magical realism of cinema. He was an exception in many ways, as few treaded the path he chose for himself.

Believed to be one of the most prominent godfathers of Bollywood during the 1990s, when he helped launch the career of many outsiders like Anupam Kher in ‘Saaransh’, Atul Agnihotri in ‘Sir’, Manoj Bajpayee in ‘Dastak’, Bipasha Basu in ‘Raaz’ and many more.

The star director’s image saw a sharp decline post-Sushant Singh Rajput’s death in June 2020, with netizens and critics accusing him of being nepotistic to star kids and encouraging the drug business in Bollywood.

The man who created the breezy romance in films like ‘Aashiqui’ (1990) was way ahead of his time. But many analysts believe that his self-obsession snatched the magic wand of the auteur.

The man whose reflection was seen in many of his films, surely needs a biography to apprise today’s generation of the Mahesh Bhatt era.