What on earth did Mr Dutt, ever the star-spotter, see in the young man to cast him as a villain in the 1968 film? Or should we applaud him for his foresight in surprise casting? Whatever it may be, what followed for the rookie was a succession of appearances as screen baddies, cops and small-time thugs in early вЂ™70s. The heady days of youthful reverie was interrupted when Sunil Dutt, having spotted the handsome future star at a party, offered him Man Ka Meet. Until then, Khanna lived a glamorous life of partying and boozing in the wild, wild country that Bombay was in the 1950-60s. One story goes that Dilip KumarвЂ™s Mughal-E-Azam inspired him to become an actor. But he opted for villain-hood and blame Sunil Dutt for it. The son of a South Bombay businessman who had relocated to India from Peshawar after Partition, Vinod Khanna had the frontier-man roots about him and with looks like his, by turns as brawny as Dharmendra and brooding as Dilip KumarвЂ™s, he could have been an easy fit in any of the numerous romantic pictures that was the order of the day in late-60s. KhannaвЂ™s career can be divided roughly into pre-Osho and post-Osho. So, it was titillating appropriate when the press labelled him as вЂsexy sanyasiвЂ™ after he quit the movie world in 1982 to follow his spiritual guru Rajneesh вЂOshoвЂ™ all the way to America. With Vinod Khanna, the adulation came from the thinking women. In his heyday, the Aradhana star was irresistible to young shrieking girls and inspired a sort of rockstar hysteria wherever he went, much like a one-sided love affair between an idol and his groupies and fantasists.

Rajesh Khanna was a different kind of eye candy. In the female-crazy popularity department, he was in the same league as Rajesh Khanna, for whom women posted love letters in blood and kissed his Impala in the absence of their heartthrob. Of these, Bachchan and Sinha were the alpha males, but Khanna was a tantalising mix of alpha maledom multiplied by the-top-three-buttons-undone rugged manliness that made him rakishly attractive to women. Along with Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Rishi Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor and Shatrughan Sinha, Vinod Khanna, who would have turned 72 today, was a fellow-traveller on that long Bollywood bridge connecting the 1970s and 1980s.

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