Those days all the movie houses – Metro, New Empire, New Excelsior, Regal, Strand -showed English films. Not one of them showed Hindi films. To see Hindi films, one had to go to Lamington Road, where there were movie houses like Imperial, Swastik, Novelty, Apsara and just before the red-light district, a movie house called Super.

 I made an exception and went to see these films with my friends from Nanik Niwas, so even though there were a lot of English films, I made it a point to see some of the Hindi films and so I got my diet of Hindi films. Although my friends made fun of me because they thought Hindi films were for the mentally retarded, I did not care and I went on seeing one film after the other, starting with Raj Kapoors ‘Awara’ and then going on to see a lot of other films.

Then suddenly the whole attitude changed of people living in South Bombay. They started seeing Hindi films and I give that credit to three people, one is Parmeshwar Godrej who was fond of Hindi films, second was Anil Ambani who is married to Tina who was also an actor in Hindi films and the third is Stardust which gave so much coverage to the stars that people started taking an interest in Hindi films. 

This gave me the idea to start a magazine on Hindi films designed on the lines of Photo Play and Screen Stories in America. I used to get these magazines from a lending library  called Shemaroo and modelled the columns and articles on these magazines. All the work was done at Creative Unit. Though I was the Editor, it was Shobha who was so happy to move out of Creative Unit and so we moved back to our old office at Agra Building and launched Stardust which in no time became a bestseller. Our first story on the cover was: “Is Rajesh Khanna secretly married’? This story was given to me by Shanti Mahendroo, (Anju Mahendro’s mother) as Anju was supposed to marry Rajesh Khanna at that time.

The cover price of our magazine was Rs 20 while Filmfare was half (Rs.10 ). We put 25,000 copies on the stands. India Book House was our distributor and within 2 days the 25,000 copies that we had printed at Army and Navy Press was sold out and we had to double our print order – and Army Navy Press which was handled by a person named by Jyoti Seth could not handle the increased print order. We moved from Army Navy to Printwell which was run by Pranav Parekh and he took over the job of printing Stardust, which went on for quite a few years and before we knew it the circulation had hit one lakh copies and we kept on adding more readers as time went along. 

To be continued……watch out for this space.