MULTAN politics in this heat is hardly a resort to confirm that you can never fully trust the people. Unless the topic is Nato supply and a truly gifted writer has been able to prophetically foretell an eventual reopening of the route, it is a gamble.

As the film buffs say, you can never predict the box office response. The box office sends a Rajesh Khanna up like a rocket leaving behind a host of critics mystified and searching for reasons behind the rise of the subcontinent’s original superstar.

He was a star who, we hear and can see, had limited acting abilities but plenty of appeal. He defied criteria. There is no removing the big Khanna example about the mysterious popular choices and the variety they add to life.

His rise in the 1970s coincided with our own exposure to all kinds of new vices, the fare dished out by Amritsar television for ready consumption by Lahore being one of the more sought-after forbidden pleasures of the times. Officially frowned upon and morally abhorred, Indian cinema thrived in Lahore via television from the early 1970s onwards. Those were the days when a Mughal-i-Azam or a Pakeeza unleashed on us innocent souls from Amritsar would be a bigger attraction than all those deghs awaiting guests at a valima reception.

By and large the earliest forays in this cultural invasion of houses in Lahore via Amritsar was restricted to a selection of old films which had little hope of a re-run in Indian cinema houses. But through commercial concerns and fizzy screens, some Rajesh Khanna films did filter through to eager audiences here.

His Kishore Kumar numbers, however, were frequently included in the extremely popular film songs ensemble that would be telecast by Doordarshan twice a week.

Anand and Kati Patang, two Khanna films which were somehow consigned to the small screen, were run and then re-run. These created sympathy but that said, it was not easy to define the reaction to the Khanna stuff on the whole. It was far from the hero worship some Hindu and mostly Muslim actors from Mumbai have enjoyed here.

A Punjabi reported to have been born in Burewala and having lived for some time in Amritsar, a Rajesh Khanna polished and packaged in Bombay appeared to strike a relationship with his new audience in Lahore.

Most of us found his acting amusing, yet it was hard to say whether the routinely underestimated popular scale here rated him too highly for his acting skills or whether he had a fan following here that was commensurate with his god-like status in India.

Yet Khanna the star did enter the vernacular big time. Long after the actor had been moved to drop into his characteristic low-key dialogue, the famous tears that Pushpa had once shed continued to be a source of, well, entertainment here.

It was not uncommon for a man who so much as sported a pair of goggles to be dubbed a Rajesh Khanna clone and gently made fun of. It appeared as if we had quite the same attitude towards the real Rajesh Khanna, whose style, when we didn’t want to emulate it, we found so easy to mimic and, our index finger stylishly raised, make good-hearted fun of.

Of course, like now, there had to be a sinister aspect to the Indian import then. In Rajesh Khanna’s biases we couldn’t always escape finding a strong reflection of our own little prejudices.

Khanna was the king and his selection of Kishore Kumar as his official voice for songs meant a virtual sidelining of our own and favourite Mohammad Rafi. This made us uneasy but rarely made us give up on an opportunity to tune in to the chief entertainers of the day — the critics’ debate about their artistic talents apart.

If the tragedy that was Anand had begun it all, in the middle part it was the lighter, catchy side to both Rajesh Khanna and Kishore Kumar that was significant.

It offered an opportunity for Pakistanis to compare how a few individuals could pilot a genre in a certain direction, in relation to the phase Pakistani cinema was itself going through. Indian cinema was said to be hugely indebted to film music. In Pakistan the pundits went as far as saying there was nothing to cinema here but music.

This dominance of individuals and of music over other ingredients that went into the making of a film created their own formulas. Rajesh Khanna faded out because of a host of factors but chiefly due to his own monotone. But his tradition and that of a more innovative Kishore Kumar continued, with variations and with simple emulation.

In Pakistan the most pronounced of the many tones that a film harboured was for long determined by the mood and texture of Noor Jahan’s voice at a given time. The male voice was gradually pushed out of the equation and led to the (socially desired?) portrayal of the hero acting as a sober, even at times disinterested, party to his ever gyrating and seductive female opposite.

This sober Pakistani hero image was in itself a culmination of a trend that had set in the Pakistani film. Just as Pakistan had Noor Jahan, it had the great Mehdi Hasan, whose voice required the on-screen Mohammad Alis and Nadeems to behave, and act with (socially desired?) restraint even if at the cost of effect.

The King of Ghazal sang many of the most difficult numbers for films. In the process, he set certain standards and a trend and didn’t allow actors to be as playful with his voice as they could be with a Mohammad Rafi or a critically less acclaimed Kishore Kumar.

One trend coexists with the other only because the people are so unpredictable about the choices they make.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.