A Screenplay of Burning Yesterdays–Leaves from my Diary – by Raj Kapoor
19 Jun, 2026 | Archival Reproductions by Cinemaazi
People write diaries. I write screenplays... My life is like a shooting script-every incident, each stray remark, flash of colour, sound, and face, is branded on a memory of burning yesterdays.
I remember every single thing that ever happened to me, every emotion, every experience, action and reaction as though it took place only yesterday. Their impact was like the impact of a vicious blow on the vulnerable body of a bewildered youngster which made him tremble with the remembered pain of. innumerable such blows.
It seems as though my own shadow was watching me, seeing everything in terms of shots, with all the wipes, dissolves, fade-ins and cuts, everything telescoped into a mass of unedited celluloid strips-caught by the camera's unblinking eye in the pitiless glare of life's arc lamps.
And so it came to pass that I wrote my first "diary"-the screenplay of "Aag," which was the very life of a young man who had a passion for films and was consumed by a desire for a brighter and more intense life.
FADE IN (WITH RISING BACKGROUND MUSIC) TO:
A close-up of a little boy: He is short, rotund, spirited and mischievous. He has a passion for eating. He talks everyone's head off! He loves to see pictures. He occupies himself with organising and staging plays. He does not like his studies. And he eats-eats all the time.
This picture of the boy must be kept in mind in visualising the sequences relating to his boyhood days. The boy's name is Ranbir Raj Kapoor.
QUICK DISSOLVE TO:
Bombay: I am the eldest son of Prithviraj, the famous actor. He works at the Imperial Film Company.
I have two younger brothers. One is named Ravinder and the other Devender. Ravinder, whom everyone calls Bindi, is far more stable, serious-minded and sensible than I. When I am up to mischief, he restrains me. One day I pluck flowers indiscriminately from the garden, and he warns me: "You must not pluck flowers from the garden like that."
DISSOLVE TO:
Father is away at the studio. Bindi suddenly takes seriously ill. Mother learns he has swallowed rat-poison and she is frantic with worry. She sends me rushing to the doctor. I run to his house, and cry aloud from downstairs: "Doctor, Bindi has swallowed poison. Come soon."
"Give him plenty of salt water and make him spew," the doctor calls back. "I'm coming!"
When I get back, mother says, "Take a taxi and go to the studio. Bring your father home at once! Don't tell him anything. Just say Bindi's not well."
All the way back he keeps asking me what is wrong with Bindi, but I maintain a stoic silence. Mother had asked me to say Bindi was not well. Nothing more.
For hours mother and father sit by Bindi's bedside-watching him sinking. Mother is weeping. Father is silent and dry-eyed. I am sick, not knowing what is happening. Why is Bindi lying there like that? Why doesn't he get up and play with me? These thoughts assail me.
Till then I did not know what death was.
Bindi dies... Then Devi dies too. I am all alone...
"I am as nothing without the camera, the arc lamps, and the scissors and cement by me..."
I see that mother is now more devoted to me, she gives in to my slightest whim. One day I see a beautiful toy car in a shop-window. I gaze at it and long to have it.
I feign illness. Mother becomes worried, and gives me medicine, which I pretend to swallow but spit out the moment her back is turned.
Then she says: "What medicine can cure you? What is it you really want?"
"Oh, nothing," I try to be casual. "Only, I saw a lovely toy car the other day... "
I see. Where?"
I tell her.
The toy car is bought and I am all right!
I get a rupee a week as pocket-money, only four rupees a month. It is too little for a boy as fond of eating as I am! So I run up a bill at the school tuck-shop!
FADE IN:
Calcutta: Father has joined New Theatres, and mother, Shammi and I come to live here. Shammi and I still get the same pocket-money. It doesn't go very far and this makes my life miserable. Every time I want to eat something I have to count the annas.
"Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs" is being shown. Mother gives' us a rupee to see the film, in the six-anna seats. I take the rupee and tell her: "I am going ahead to join the queue. Send Shammi with the servant."
When I arrive at the theatre I find they have raised the rates, and only twelve-anna seats are available. However, I join the queue. When I come up to the booking-office window I haven't made up my mind what to do.
"How many?" asks the booking-office clerk.
" 'Aag' was the very life of a young man who had a passion for films and was consumed by a desire for a more intense life... Ten years have passed since then. They were the fullest years of my life, rich in personal experience, and abounding in valuable associations... with colleagues about me all the time, creating the entire fabric of the picture with vision and imagination..."
I hand him the rupee, and get my ticket and the change. Casting a furtive glance around to see if Shammi has arrived, I sneak into the theatre.
I enjoy the film. But when I come out of the theatre I have a problem facing me! How to explain my roguery to mother? I fortify myself with two annas' worth of my favourite "chingri" cutlets. Then I throw away my little purse with the remaining two-anna bit in it and go home in a rickshaw. As soon as the rickshaw stops in front of the house, I put on a sad face and call out to mother. No sooner does she see me than she asks: "Where were you? Shammi came home crying! You had disappeared and he couldn't see the picture."
"I lost my purse with the rupee in it!" I wailed. "And went all over looking for it! I got so tired I had to take a rickshaw to come home!"
So, mother spends another twelve annas to pay the rickshawalla!
Because I am fat my masters do not think I am any good at games, but I long to play in all the matches-football, hockey, cricket. The hockey and football uniforms, striped shirts with white shorts and boots, excite my fancy and I yearn to wear them. Besides, the players get lemonade and sandwiches after the match!
I plead with the games master to take me as a linesman! I have only to run up and down the line with a flag, but it is thrilling. After the match, there was cold lemonade to drink and sandwiches to eat!
In course of time everyone realises why I wanted to be a linesman and my friends tease me, "Lemonade for the linesman."
I love to act on the stage. "Acting is in my blood," I tell the master in charge of dramatics to persuade him to cast me in the Passion Play the school stages every year at Easter.
"Today each has gone his separate way – after his own personal mirage, and I find myself standing again, as it were, on the threshold of a fresh phase of my life. I must begin alone again, as I began many years ago. It is good to feel this way..."
I have won several cups in elocution contests and feel it is my right to act in the play. After all, am I not the son of the great actor Prithviraj? But the master doesn't see it my way.
How I envy the other boys who go on the stage in flowing robes to declaim their lines! Then one day I am chosen as' an "extra" for the Passion Play. I am only one of many extras, but J boast about my part in the play to my parents when I go home.
"I'm taking part in the Passion Play." I tell them with an air of importance. "They are going to measure me for my costume tomorrow."
I get my robe. More important, I get a little book of coupons which entitle me to free coffee, sandwiches and chips after the performance!
The show begins at 8-30 p.m. I have to make only two entries with a number of other bit players. I go on for both. But there is a third one for a group of three or four boys. I am not in it. But excited and carried away by the. solemnity of the play and my own participation in it, I join this group and go on again. Everything goes well and I think it is all right.
It is a tense scene the principals are enacting. My foot gets caught in my flowing robe and I fall with a resounding thud on the stage. The audience breaks into a ripple of suppressed laughter!
The drama master is on the stage, playing Judas Iscariot. He gives me a chilling look as J struggle to my feet.
As soon as the curtain falls he grabs me.
"So acting's in your blood, eh?" he growls angrily. "You don't even know your cues! You come on at the wrong moment and then make an ass of yourself. Get out! You're through! Hand in your robe and those coupons, and go home!"
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In this fortnight "Diary", producer-director-actor Raj Kapoor lays bare the hidden secrets of his life.
DISSOLVE TO:
Bombay: I see a great many pictures, win cups in elocution competitions and debates, and I still eat a lot: My heart is not in my studies and I detest Latin, which is my second language. There is a debate on the subject: "Why revive dead languages? Let them stay dead" and I speak for the motion.
I just manage to get promoted every year and I come eventually to the matriculation class. Here at the preliminary examination Latin stumps me and I fail. I am dejected, hurt and rebellious at the prospect of having to repeat the year and be in the same dreary rut again. I take the train to go home. (We lived at Matunga then.) Utterly despondent, I want to put an end to my life.
The train stops suddenly before entering Matunga station. I am too preoccupied to notice it. It is only after some minutes that I realise that people are getting out of the compartment and rushing somewhere. I follow them.
A man has been run over. The body lies in a pool of blood. I feel sick at the sight, but I force myself to look at it.
The death of the man sets me thinking. I realise that it is wonderful to live and that one can live a full life. I put aside my morbid thoughts of death.
When I get home I tell father that I have failed the examination. "That's all right," he says philosophically. "There's always next year."
Then I tell him what I had been making up my mind to say for several months.
"Look, father," I tell him., "It's like this. When a boy wants to become a doctor he goes to a medical college, and when he wants to become a lawyer he goes to a law college. I want to make pictures. I want to be a director, a producer, an actor. But there is no college or institution for training in any of those branches of film-making. So, instead of wasting the next five years studying something I don't want to learn and joining a studio at the end of that period, I'd like to start work in a studio at once."
Father likes my argument. I owe a great deal to him for his understanding of my problem. Next morning I join Ranjit Studio as third assistant to Kidar Sharma.
My emotional life is inextricably woven with the fascinating hill-station of Murree. With its high mountains and steep valleys, running brooks and long, winding paths, it is the most beautiful place in the world to me As a boy I spent some of my happiest days at Murree, and in later years I fled there in times of emotional stress or when I was consumed by the flame of a new experience.
When I fell in love I went to the Murree Hills, and when it was over, I fled. there again. I went there again when I left Bombay Talkies, and when I got married.
But that was long ago, before India was partitioned. Today, the Murree Hills do not exist for me; they lie buried deep in my memory...
DISSOLVE BACK TO:
Bombay: First Ranjit Studios, then Bombay Talkies, then Prithvi Theatres and the stage, and, finally, R K Films.
And so it came to pass that I wrote my first "diary"- the screenplay of "Aag", which was the very life of a young man who had a passion for films, and was consumed by a desire for a brighter and more intense life.
The distributors were seeing the rushes of my half-completed "Aag". One of them went to sleep, so bored was he. But he never liked seeing rushes. He said: "I don't back a picture. I back a man."
Another said: "This film will not nm in any territory. I can offer only fifteen thousand rupees for East Punjab." He paid a lakh and a quarter for my latest film and the same territory.
Only one, the Bombay distributor, Mr Babubhai Mehta, was wide-awake. "Whether this film runs or not," he said, "I must have it at all costs."
TODAY:
Ten years have passed since then. They were the fullest years of my life, rich in personal experience, full of life and energy devoted to the making of pictures, and abounding in valuable associations with colleagues.
I am temperamentally unsuited to the making of pictures piecemeal. I must have my colleagues about me all the time, trying out the music, arguing over the story and situations, creating the entire fabric of the picture with vision and imagination. All the time their minds are in tune with mine.
That is how it was in the past decade.
Today, each has gone his separate way–after his own personal mirage, and I find myself standing again, as it were, on the threshold of a fresh phase of my life, with ambitions to be fulfilled.
My work has always been my life and I am as nothing without the camera, the arc lamps, the sound van, the strips of celluloid on the movieola. and the scissors and cement beside me.
So I must begin alone again, as I began many years ago. It is good to feel this way. Once again I sense the challenge flung at me and I turn to face it eagerly like a jaguar on a treetop about to spring...
This article was published in 'Filmfare' magazine's 21 June 1957 edition.
The images and captions are from the original article.
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