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Amar Singh is getting all misty-eyed about Shammi Uncle when we are interrupted by an aide bearing the news that he has a visitor. “Anil Ambani aa gaye hai?” Amar Singh asks. Take him inside, he says, and then gets right back to the actor with jelly limbs.
The industrialist’s arrival is inopportune, for Amar Singh has till then been holding forth on friends, foes and other mavericks. But the man who wrote the original book on how to make friends and influence people lets Ambani wait in his government bungalow in Lutyens’s Delhi, while he continues with the interview in the adjoining study. But you know that it can no longer be a seamless conversation — the clock is now ticking away.
It has taken some persistent coaxing to make him emerge out of his self-induced shell. Singh has been uncharacteristically quiet for a while. There is, of course, good reason for that: the Samajwadi Party (SP), of which he is the general secretary, has lost power in Uttar Pradesh, chief minister Mayawati has been talking about “the law taking its own course” — a euphemism for political vendetta — and Singh has been ailing.
But the MP doesn’t seem greatly worried either. “I don’t get euphoric in victory, and I don’t get very sad when I am defeated,” he says.
One of his aides has laid down the rules for the interview: we are not to discuss politics, or anything abjectly prickly. But then, there is nothing left to say about UP, even though some in the SP are convinced that former chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav was ousted because he left his socialist plank for Amar Singh’s socialite flank.
Singh doesn’t think so. “People insinuate that I am responsible for a change in Mulayam Singh’s lifestyle — but his lifestyle can never be changed,” says Singh. “We are two different personalities. I like music, theatre, cinema; he doesn’t. The only sport in his life is wrestling, which I can’t stand. I find him a very dry and boring person because he doesn’t like anything that I like.”
Mulayam, for instance, may not quite share Amar Singh’s views on Sadhna, a Hindi film heroine of the Sixties remembered primarily for popularising a fringe known as the Sadhna cut. “Sadhna is the sexiest woman ever. And the real Casanova of Indian cinema is Shammi Uncle. He knows that I am a great fan of his.”
Shammi Kapoor is just one of the many people he knows in Mumbai. Folklore has it that if you ever need any help, Singh will be there to bail you out. Once, goes a story, a beautiful and now middle-aged actress was stranded in an airport in Europe without a visa. She called Singh, and he said: “You sit in the café and have your coffee. I will get it done.” She did, and he did.
Singh does not confirm or deny the story, but explains that it is all about accessibility. “It’s not that only Amar Singh can get it done. Sonia Gandhi, like many other leaders, is not accessible. I am. It’s no big deal.”
Modesty is his calling card, though it does tend to mingle with a streak of open pride in his friends in high places. “The Bachchans are not friends — they, Tina and Anil are family,” he says.
Anil, meanwhile, is still waiting within the Lodhi Estate house, the lawns of which are dotted with marble cherubs and angels. The study is a picture in contrast — a working room with large portraits of Dhirubhai Ambani, Amitabh Bachchan and Mulayam Singh on the wall. “Dhirubhai is dead and gone, but I still have his picture. Mukesh (Ambani) hates me and I hate him, but my contempt for Mukesh has not affected my respect for Dhirubhai. If Dhirubhai had been here, Mukesh would not have dared to behave the way he did.”
Amar Singh, 51, sits in front of the portraits, thinner than usual (“that’s because of Sonia Gandhi and her act of political squeezing”) and speaking in his usual, low-toned staccato style. And, somewhat disconcertingly, he peppers the end of every answer with a peremptory, “Next!”
For a man who grew up in Burra- bazar — running, as he says, to see Jyoti Basu every time he heard the siren on the then chief minister’s car — it’s been a straight walk up the social, political and economic ladder.
His father had a hardware business in Calcutta, but Singh left for UP when he was 18. “It is a city that has given me moral courage, strength and values, so I feel I should pay something back. My income tax is growing in volume, but I still file my assessments there.”
Today, he owns two hydel-power projects in Karnataka and Kerala, trading companies and an organic chemical business. But Singh, who joined the Congress’s youth wing, the Chhatra Parishad, as a teenager, says he is in touch with his old city and friends. Just the other day, Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee dragged him to her house and cooked him a meal of fish and rice. “She always treats me with the same affection.”
You can’t say the same about Sonia Gandhi, though. “If you differ with someone you are treated like an enemy. I am not of that ilk. I’d like Sonia Gandhi also to be my friend. But the politics of lack of tolerance says: follow, or be liquidated,” he says.
Singh’s political journey, however, took off as he followed former chief minister Vir Bahadur Singh to UP. “We became close because we were both Rajputs from eastern UP and spoke the same language.” Vir Bahadur wanted him to fight an election from UP, but “V.P. Singh opposed the move.”
A few years down the line, when he was in Delhi and close to Madhavrao Scindia — thanks largely to a one-vote victory that Singh engineered for him in a BCCI election against Jagmohan Dalmiya — the Congressman tried to get him to Parliament from Madhya Pradesh. This time, Arjun Singh came in the way. “I am thankful to my fellow Rajputs who opposed me. Else, I would have been an ordinary MLA or MP of the Congress.”
Instead, Singh left the Congress when Scindia broke away from the party, and joined Mulayam Singh, whom he knew from his UP days. Today, he is the public face of the SP, led by a man not known for his sparkling speech. Singh, on the other hand, has a quote for every occasion.
BJP leader Arun Jaitley recalls a television programme in which Singh replied to viewers’ queries with songs from Hindi films. “He is a very witty man,” says Jaitley. “I like Arun Jaitley,” is Singh's reply.
The allusions to Hindi songs, though, are not surprising, for Amar Singh likes his music — from Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Amirbai Karnataki to Hemant Kumar. “Don’t see it as a Bengali bias, but I am genuinely very fond of Hemantda’s voice. Rafi may have had a range, and Manna Dey a classical tinge, but I don’t think any other singer had his melody and sweetness.”
Amar Singh grew up listening to Hemantda as he finished his graduation in English from St Xavier’s college in Calcutta. “My father used to say: study not with the view of getting knowledge, but with the view of getting a degree. Not having a degree gives you an inferiority complex.”
Those were golden words, and gave Singh his sense of confidence. “I am not ashamed of my humble beginnings,” he says. What is equally true is that he is proud of his immensely successful friends. “If you have one friend who has a tear for your sorrow and a smile for your joy, you’re fortunate. I have at least two — Anil and Mr Bachchan. And in Mulayam Singh, I have a leader who solidly backs me like a rock. What more can I ask for?”
The extended family is there, too, though with some unhappy fissures. Singh has built a house in a tony part of south Delhi for his parents. He has an elder sister, with whom he has a “good, formal relationship”, and a younger brother with whom he has no contact at all.
“When your growth is self-made, family members’ expectations are very high and they want you to pull them to your level. And when you can’t do that, there is animosity. And it is normal for parents to take sides with the weaker members of the family,” he says. “A giver should always give, and a taker should always take. At times, it is frustrating: oh, your children are getting this, our children should also get this.”
Singh’s children, for the record, are six-year-old twins called Drishti and Disha, students of Vasant Valley School. Mani Ratnam’s Guru, a film loosely based on the life of Dhirubhai, has a scene where the protagonists, Abhishek and Aishwariya, are cooing over their newborn twin babies whom they name Drishti and Disha. “Abhishek must have suggested the names — for they are like his sisters. Thanks to him, my two daughters have been immortalised.”
This time there is no ‘Next!’ Amar Singh winds up and moves into the residential part of his bungalow. But his aide is looking particularly harassed. “Chaley gaye (has he left),” he frantically asks a staffer.
Somebody has left. I just hope it’s not Anil Ambani.