Life and times of a veteran film journalist in Mumbai… Ali Peter John will be remembered in the annals of Hindi film cinema with warmth and many memories.
By Rajan Narayan
THE story of Ali Peter John is more dramatic than any blockbuster Bollywood movie. Ali’s father was the brother of the famous ornithologist Salim Ali after whom the Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary in Chorao is named. Unlike the distinguished Salim Ali, Ali Peter John’s was an alcoholic.
Salim Ali’s brother decided to marry Ali’s Goan mother working as a maid in his palatial house in Malabar Hill in Mumbai. Two children later, Ali’s father died. The Salim Ali family threw out the family and the children including Ali Peter John from the family.
However, the gutsy mother was determined to bring up her children and give them the best education she could. She moved to a slum colony called Kondivita in Andheri (East) in Mumbai and having no other skills she set up a “bhatti” for distilling and selling desi daru. Those were the days of prohibition in Mumbai and there was a great demand for desi daru with exotic names like “Musambi” and “Narangi.”
Ali, the elder son, was sent to the best convent English-medium school in the area. He displayed a natural aptitude for English. Indeed, by the age of 14 years he was so good in English that all the local lovers used to get their love letters written by Ali!
AHMAD ABBAS
ALI was lucky that he was introduced to Indian film director, screenwriter, novelist and Urdu journalist, Ahmad Abbas. Ali went to work with him as his secretary. It was Ali who finalized the contract of Amitabh Bachchan whose first film “Saat Hindustani” in 1969, on the Goa Liberation, was made by KA Abbas. Ali subsequently join Screen which was the largest broadsheet film newspaper in the country.
Screen was part of the Indian Express Group of publications. This was where I first met Ali at the age of 21. At that time all the staff of the various publications of Indian Express set in one large hall on the first floor of the newly built 24-storied Express Tower at Nariman Point in Mumbai.
The desk of Ali Peter John was just behind that of the staff of the Financial Express, the financial daily of the Express Group for which I used to work. All the major film stars of the 70s like Hema Malini and Dharmendra use to come visit Ali to get publicity for their latest movies. Be in the Financial Express we used to pretend to ignore the film stars who came in to see Ali because we thought it was below our dignity to stare at film stars!
Ali was the most popular film journalist because he was totally honest and never hurt any film star. On the contrary in their bad days, when for instance, Rajesh Khanna became an alcoholic, Ali was the only one who would keep him company. By that time the magic of the film Bobby had vanished and Dimple Kapadia had left Rajesh Khanna.
FRIEND OF FILMSTARS
ALI Peter John, the name combining that of his Muslim father and his Goan mother worked for almost 40 years for Screen. He was second only to the editor of Screen. Soon he became the favorite of all the film star. It was Ali who went out of the way to help film stars in their struggling days. From the time Amitabh Bachchan used to sleep on the pavement in Mumbai to helping Rekha who was used and abused by film producers (with the support of her ambitious mother).
Ali’s human interest stories which he wrote for me in the various magazines I edited in Mumbai, including Mirror, Imprint and Onlooker, etc, were far more interesting than his film stories. Ali knew both the underworld characters including the pickpockets and petty thieves as much as he knew the top film stars. If you got your pocket picked between Churchgate and Andheri, which was a distance of 30 km on the local train, Ali could get your wallet back for you.
Our most interesting experience was an interview with Anees, the brother of the “Godfather of Goons” Dawood Ibrahim. Anees used to dress up as an Arab, book a room at the Oberoi Hotel and extort huge amounts of money on the pretext of getting good jobs in the Gulf. As the editor of Imprint I decided to do a cover story titled “Goodbye Bombay, Hello Dubai.”
Ali organized the interview for me with Anees. Three of us met at an Aunty’s joint in Dadar. Small liquor shops retailing desi daru were called Aunties bars in Bombay. Goan women in Mumbai took full advantage of prohibition and converted their living rooms into such bars, the added attraction they offered with the low cost liquor was boiled chana.
Anees boasted about how he had made large amounts of money by pretending to be an Arab offering jobs in the Gulf. At midnight the Aunty told us that she was closing down and asked us to quit. The aunty had a pretty daughter named Julie and every few minutes Anees, already very drunk, would throw flying kisses at her.
When the aunty asked us to get out Anees picked up a few bottles and a Rampuri knife and stepped out. He hijacked a taxi parked on the road outside. The driver dared not protest as he had the reputation of being a goonda. Unfortunately, the taxi which he was driving towards the beach to continue our interview crashed into the car of the Mayor of Bombay who also lived in Dadar. All three of us had to spend the night in the lock-up until Dawood came in the morning, distributed money, and let us all out.
The last time I have saw Ali was at the International Film Festival of India several years ago. Dev Anand had invited him to the film festival and Ali accompanied him. Both of them were there at the party hosted by the then Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar at the Taj Aguada Hotel. Dev Anand had organized a deluxe room for Ali from at his expense and the organizers would not pay for Ali’s expense.
MARRIED LIFE
ALI’S brother was murdered when he was in his 20s. The brother had married Usha who was working for the Bombay Municipality. They had a daughter before the brother was murdered. After a great deal of pressure Ali married his sister-in-law so that the girl would have a father. I recall him telling me that he decided to follow the example of the film Ek Chadar Maili Si in which the heroine (Hema Malini) married her brother-in-law after her drunken husband dies.
All through the later illnesses of Ali and the accidents which happened to him various stalwarts of the film industry took care of his financial needs and Ali. Shahrukh Khan’s team took care of him after he met with a bad accident. During his final days a film producer friend gave him an office and a secretary as Ali could not type (like me).
Ali must have had a premonition that his end was near for he endorsed it on a Facebook post. Last week he posted, “The eyes tell it all the end seems to be at hand and it is finally time to go.” Predictably, the next week Ali was gone. The film industry organized a grand send-off for Ali Peter John. This is the story of one of the leading film journalists of the 80s and the 90s. RIP Ali.