Karz Turns 41: Unknown Facts About The Rishi Kapoor-Tina Munim- Simi Garewal Starrer

As Karz, the Subhash Ghai directorial completes 41 years today, we bring to you se lesser known facts about the Rishi Kapoor- Tina Munim starrer, which had Simi Garewal as the negative lead:

1. Karz was not runaway hit. It opened poorly and got eclipsed by the two big hits of 1980 Feroz Khan’s Qurbani and J Om Prakash’s Asha. It was another instance of a film on the the theme of irncarnation not doing well. Only Madhumati and Milan on the punar-janam theme had done well.

2. The credit for the film’s retro-success goes to Rishi Kapoor and Laxmikant-Pyarelal. Rishi playing the stage performer Monty danced to Laxmi-Pyare’s rumbustous songs Om shanti om, Paisa yeh paisa and the masterpiece Ek haseena thi, ek deewana tha like there was no tomorrow. Never seen any actor dance on stage the way Rishi did in Karz. He spoke to me about the bruised and battered kneecaps as he fell to the floor gyrating frenetically.

3. The other USP of Karz was Simi Garewal as the first bona fide female villain of Bollywood. Simi had huge reservations about playing such an evil woman who murders her husband for the money. The film won Simi a lot of accolades. But she refused all the negative roles that came her way after Karz.

4. Raj Kiran the handsome affable actor who played Rishi Kapoor in his previous birth ,disappeared from Bollywood. Many years later Rishi found him in Atlanta. He was confined to an institution in Atlanta due to health problems. What’s perturbing is that his family too had more or less left Raj to his own devices. He paid for his own treatment in Atlanta by working within the institution. It appears that his wife with their son abandoned him at some unknown point, the shock of which he couldn’t bear. The rest of his family too didn’t bother, seemingly because his mood swings were intolerable and then it was far too expensive for them to get him treated. It seems Raj went through a series of domestic crises which left him in a state of acute depression. He was apparently institutionalized in India before he left for the US. His family including his elder brother Govind and younger Ajit, are not in touch with him. When Rishi asked Govind for Raj’s phone number, the brother didn’t have it! Though Raj has not been working for a long time, he invested well. So he was not financially challenged by his illness. The actor, whose dazzling smile had lit up many potboilers for two decades, giving remarkable performances in films like B R Ishaara’s Kaagaz Ki Nao, Ghar Ho To Aisa with Anil Kapoor, Meenakshi Sheshadri and Deepti Naval and Kaaran apart from Subhash Ghai’s hit Karz and Mahesh Bhatt’s critically acclaimed Arth in the 1980s, had vanished for almost a decade.



Image Source: Instagram/cinemakalaajaurkal/bollywood_9149, imdb