Shammi Kapoor.

That he’s most of our dads’ favourite actor is a given. While our mothers’ picked between Dharmendra  and Rajesh Khanna,  and were vocal about it (depending on whether they perceived themselves as the thinking women or not), Dads, I have come to discover, have often favoured Shammi Kapoor, for some inexplicable reason.

Either way, I will tell you my earliest memory of Shammi Kapoor, because it might just be one of my earliest conscious memories of analysis, and recorded things need to be recorded some more. And this is from the time I was 5, and I know and clearly remember the exact place it happened, and when and how it did.

I saw the Pan Parag ad, right before the sunday movie, the one with Ashok Kumar, and then someone told me that the other guy in the ad was Shammi Kapoor. A young five year old me spent at least five days in denial that the guy I knew as Shammi Kapoor –  young, suave, active, jumping like a monkey, and who is my dad’s favourite, was the same weird, long-haired guy in the Pan Parag ad.

Since then, I’ve wondered (not often) about if someone as accomplished as him had any regrets about doing a ‘gutka’ ad (think Amitabh Bachchan & Navratan Oil), till I found this  very recently.  Here’s he talking about the ad, and why he agreed to doing it.