byomkesh and the seventh horse

rajit kapoor(not the rajat kapoor who is doing so well in bheja fry and likes..) is one of my fav. actors.with an immensely forgettable role in the sick slick flick ghulam,he disappeared from public memory.but those who remember byomkesh bakshi,the 23 episode serial which was telecast on the doordarshan,would know the true potential of that man.byomkesh by sardendu ,is one of the finest characters in detection created in literature including English.byomkesh is smart,pragmatic and stunningly brilliant..
he is any-days better than mediocre s like Poirot,Rex stout, Lupin,and matches Father Brown,Saint,and even Holmes any day.set in middle class Calcutta,with all its ramifications,Byomkesh is visible,identifiable and so much the part of the Indian pathos.
Here,even a recovery of a lost purse means a lot,without the purse carrying any secret nuclear program details.
personally i think its next to impossible to recover a lost purse in India,unless u r Somebody.
Byomkesh filled that lacunae ably which chilling intelligence.bengalis sp.the 60's 70's will cringe at the statement that Rajit kapoor played that role with a finesse,and mastery far surpassing the revered Uttam Kumar(Soumitro is not even in the competition,sorry people..brilliance is not his forte),but the statement stands.
anyone who saw the serial,would have mistaken rajit as a typical Bengali middle class intelligent teacher,the kind who has topped university mathematics exams,without much effort,and is doing a govt job.
anyone playing byomkesh again will have to match his smile,which was never dumb,or out of place,his confidence,which was always in place,his gait in that dhuti- unpretentious,just perfect..
well i stayed his fan ever since.and when suraj ka satvaan ghoda was released,i was ecstatic.
it went ahead and won awards at different levels-the parallel movie kind.
in fact i tried to watch the movie once on TV and ended up watching mujse dosti karoge(not the Hritick Roshan one!)which was pretty cool too,100 times better than the Hritick Roshan,Kareena kapoor starrer.Still it was the smartest ,slickest most happening name ever for any hindi movie ever,and somehow it sounded like those smart westerns,super action filled semi historical,semi fabulous movie.the fact that it was a rajit kapoor movie,seemed just apt.
i caught the movie several years later,well ..
i couldn't sit through the whole movie,but rajit was in his true self..
unparalleled...
then i saw him in ghulam,and aamir khan finished him for keeps.(i hate aamir khan-that guy is a fake if ever there was one)
but the name stays
suraj ka satvaan ghoda...
a ode to all that could have been
so lucky that no one has picked such a dashing name already...
to you Mr Rajit kapoor,take a bow!