Memoirs of an Intense Life
Amitabha Bhattacharya
STORIES I MUST TELL: THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF AN ACTOR by Kabir Bedi Westland Publications, 2021, 311 pp., ₹ 699.00
February 2023, volume 47, No 2

At the outset I must confess that I have never been a Bollywood aficionado and that I have not ever seen a film where Kabir Bedi had acted. Yet, I find his life, vignettes of which he has sensitively narrated in his memoir, unusually interesting, sometime even profound. In fact, after completing the book that mixes adroitly the profane with the sacred, I feel tempted to know more about him.

This is not a kind of book that one expects from the pen of a film hero. The stories of his lived experiences are not the ones of an alpha male moving from one affair to the other but of a mature mind trying to recollect emotions in tranquillity. Few persons have lived such a turbulent life, and fewer have exhibited the capacity to weave stories that are frank but not superficial, detailed yet not tiresome.

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