The age difference between Bunty and me is four and a half years and though this difference seems a lot when you are ten years old, as you grow older the age gap somehow lessens. That's exactly how it happened between us too. From the very beginning, we were never very dissimilar. Except that he is more practical, more organized. He is the manager in the family. I'm not as organised as he is. As kids, when we were given toys, mine invariably broke in two months, whilst his lasted for two years. The same with textbooks. While mine tore off, his remained neatly covered till the end of the year. It's funny, but after all these years, he still surprises me with an odd letter, and odd book, preserved in some old corner. He is a greater preserver. I am too, I do keep letters, gifts, but not in the way he does. Besides, these days it's a problem for me to preserve myself.
Time was when I had a lot of energy, enthusiasm, drive. But Bunty always took more initiative than I did. And it's true that he is responsible for my joining movies, but I don't think, I ever told him specifically that this is what I want to do. There is not one particular incident, moment when I have discussed with him what I desire. But, because we were always together, because we understood each other, and more important, because of those several meetings at the dining table with our parents, when ideas, arguments were shared, we were all fairly intimate with the other's mind, behaviour patterns. Maybe his this idea emanated out of that. For one day, he brought this advertisement to me and said, "Look at this. This is where you ought to be." And I said, "Okay, fine, but how does one go about it?" He said, "We'll have to first get your photographs done." And since there were no photographs, he clicked some himself. The picture that was sent to the Bombay Producers' Association, was one clicked by him. As I said, he was very enterprising. On that front, I'm a little shy. Even when I started doing my shows, it wasn't really so much my idea, as his. He was the one who virtually coaxed me into performing these stage shows. All credit on this score should go to him, his foresight. Even today, I remember our first show... He was there, bang on, supervising the show from behind the scenes. Again, in '82, when I stopped doing the shows he was the one to provoke me into re-starting them. When he realized that I wasn't excited enough, he stimulated me with big scale ideas, "You should do them lavishly. Like the Madonna and Jackson shows." And it worked! The superb managing is all his brain work.