Romancing With Life: An Autobiography
Dev Anand
Viking, Rs 695

First, the revelation. The evergreen young man is actually a wide-eyed boy. Maybe that’s the reason he is the evergreen young man.
Romancing With Life is the title of the legendary Dev Anand’s autobiography. And romancing the life has it been for him, with amazing hits, misses, slips and adventures. The way he writes will often remind you of the heroes of the classic American paperback bestsellers, but then, this is all real, and it is the greatest story in this story. As you read the tale of the boy in the 1930s Gurdaspur — one who had stars in his eyes not just for cinema but for everything else in life that seemed out of his league — you get easily carried away with the almost potboiler-like narration of how he not only reached the league he desired, but also invented one of his own which is yet to be matched quite in the same way.

He writes like a cross between a paperback writer, a screenplay writer and an advertising copywriter, complete with big statements, great one-liners, film-like cut-points and dramatic incidents, all of which at times seem too fantastic to be true. But as you go on, if you have even an elementary knowledge of the Hindi film industry, it slowly begins to dawn upon you that it all actually bloody happened. And you begin cursing the fate for bringing you into this world too late, almost when all the fun is over. It was a different era. The cool, swinging Bombay of the ’40s, which could make the one of today look like a silly imitation. The legendary studio system that moved freely between Bombay and Poona, with huge stars on meagre salaries. The passionate relationships between the giant men and women who ruled it. And in all this you witness the transformation of the awkward but brash young man from Punjab, with a high school-dude-like-spring in the step and a debating society-winner-like-gift for putting his best foot forward, into India’s new style icon.

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