In my proud opinion, no one, not even Mahatma Gandhi, was a greater superhero in India than Dara Singh. He inspired ge nerations of youth in our deprived villages to fight honestly and achieve. His was not a non-violence movement, but neither was it a passive tolerance of injustices perpetrated upon the poor in the name of political expediency. He spun Westerners overhead and flung them out of the ring with a sense of national pride that our earlier made-in-England leaders never had the guts to do.

The very name used to send adrenaline shooting through every Indian’s veins while this Indian Colossus who we heard drank a gallon of milk at breakfast to wash down six full chickens and sometimes two dozen eggs as well, appeared in the wrestling ring opposite the greatest names from all over the world.

But the mighty King Kong, from Australia, who looked and behaved as brutally as his namesake who climbed the Empire State Building, was the most formidable foe Dara encountered. Yet in match after match (with no fixing by banias as promoters) Dara won every one of the over five hundred bouts he fought. Never a rude or crude gesture towards any opponent; no sponsorship logo on his body or underwear; no endorsements in a world that had not succumbed to consumerism; he was simply the greatest Indian hero alive.

In a fashionable world of make-believe ruled by Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, while we stuff our faces with American fast foods, we in India had a superhero like none other anywhere in the world, who the current generation of vegetarians on treadmills whose only obsession is fairness creams and cricket, hadn’t heard of or toasted over a tetra pack of carcinogenic fruit juice.

Dara Singh — who, even at the end of his life, didn’t sell Pizzas and Pastas, nor energising pills that sponsored an impotent cricket team, promoted cooking the good old Indian way (that Johns Hopkins is now hard-pressed to condemn) with Pure Ghee instead of the olive oils that no longer massage babies but cater to a confused new rich who study the style of dipping their phulkas in balsamic vinegar. That’s what I define as a pukka, true-blue Indian. Blue, because he was royalty; he was our one and only, Rustam-e-Hind.

I was a young boy when I first saw Dara Singh and King Kong fight in Calcutta. I watched him raise the 200 kilo King Kong over his head and spin while we all screamed and shouted ourselves hoarse in the crowds, but Dara had stopped throwing him outside the ring but instead smashed him down on the canvas, with nothing rigged or rubberised as happens in the WWF sport for children today.

The closest I came to meeting the legend was when my daughter hired one of his outhouses in Juhu. It was one of the safest places for young single girls and with Dara as their Godfather, no one dared venture into the compound. I saw him leisurely walk around his garden; shoulders straight and upright, chest out and stomach as flat as ever. A towering God even in his seventies. I could have sworn I saw Palaestra, the Goddess of Wrestling, keeping an eye on him and my daughter from the rose bushes.

Steve Reeves was Hollywood’s Samson and Hercules of our times, like the misshapen and toothy terminator Schwarzenegger was in recent years. But Dara Singh never rippled muscles or advertised abs to crowds who then worshipped the superhero for what he delivered and not for the way he looked. And this Singh was never “the underachiever” of our times. When he stood up he looked a Giant that no one would ever vanquish; and they never did.

I was shivering with excitement at the Commonwealth Wrestling Games in Calcutta, in 1959. I remember desperately wanting to go for a pee while lights swirled overhead and the final bout between Dara Singh and an opponent, whose name I don’t remember but who looked like a Cyclop and Goliath rolled into one, was frothing at the mouth to smother and decimate our national Wonderman. I have such an embellished fantasy about what followed that I shall probably write a phantasmagorical book one day that will contain a chapter on whirling skies and planets and silenced birds and owls perched on bats’ wings to get a stellar view of the match.

I crossed my knees and shut my eyes tight while the world around me fell apart with screams and shouts and then a deathly silence that seemed to last forever. My eyes sprung open with fear and then the world around me exploded in Joy as Dara was crowned the champion of the Commonwealth.

It all seems a far cry from the last Commonwealth Games that exposed our sickly and sickening innards. Dara was incorruptible. The match was held under the flag of the High Court of Calcutta at the point Khudiram, another great hero our youth have forgotten, stands today. Dara was unpurchaseable: always nothing but a one hundred per cent Indian.

And in the history of cinema worldwide, there are just two great icons whose films never lost at the box office. Dara Singh and Elvis Presley. I loved Dara, my wife loved Presley, and that gave us enough reason to romance forever together. And it was after that victory, in Calcutta, that Dara was made his first film offer right here in our great city. The rest, is history.