On Monday evening, an official launch of ‘Unlikely Hero: Om Puri’, a biography of the versatile actor by his wife Nandita Puri, a former journalist, took place at a Mumbai hotel. It was a dramatic evening. Puri was so hurt, angry and ashamed by the insensitive handling of the biography’s material in some newspapers and TV news channels, that he was in tears in the middle of the launch and stepped down from the stage. Before the book was released, a chapter about Puri’s affair with Santi, a domestic help, when he was just 14, was quoted, and made a hue and cry of.

Obviously, there was no communication between Puri and his wife about whether or how to include this biographical information. If he was so sensitive about personal details, the agreement could have been reached during the writing itself, beween the biographer and her subject.

I got my copy of the thin book this afternoon, and began turning the pages immediately. In the introduction, Patrick Swayze, who acted with Puri in ‘City of Joy’ in 1991, writes: “All you have to do is look at Om’s face. He is a man who has been beaten up. You can see old scores in his eyes and you want to know more about this man the moment you look into his eyes. The sensitivity is counterpointed with wisdom and that is Om Puri to me. ” Sadly, Nandita Puri has done little, by virtue of writing, insight or research, to portray a man so layered. Her examination of Puri’s life, and his illustrious career, is cursory, impersonal and without creative judgement.

Even so, the sensationalizing of adolescent Om’s little love affair with an elderly maid is pathetic. Is it because we are not used to idols and artists with sex scandals in their past and when we get to know one, we magnify them and place them out of context? Is it that such details should only be judiciously included in a biography? I would think, the second. The information about the affair/incident marks a kind of a turning point in Puri’s life and perhaps that is what it is meant to be in the book. But Nandita Puri fails to bring that out in her writing.

The good parts bout the book: a chapter by Naseeruddin Shah on his old friend and rival, some rare photographs, his days at the National School of Drama and the Film and Television Institute of India, taking wings in Bombay in the early 1970s, working with directors of all genres and schools and Puri as a father to his son Ishaan and as a family man.

The chapters are wafer thin, and in no way offer an indepth portrait of one of the most talented Indian actors of all time, but even so, the chapter about the affair can be ignored.

Don’t judge Om Puri and his amazing body of work by a stupid incident involving sex when he was an adolescent. Judge him by his roles in Aakrosh, Bhavni Bhavai, Ardh Satya, Droh Kaal, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Dharavi, Gandhi, East is East….and many more such gems.

Real cinema lovers would hope and believe that they are yet to see Om Puri’s best.