Fans married kaka photos, cried on his wedding day

When Rajesh Khanna said in an electric fan commercial recently that no one could steal his fans from him, he was not joking.

When Rajesh Khanna said in an electric fan commercial recently that no one could steal his fans from him, he was not joking. All the ooh-ing and aah-ing that girls do for their male idols today holds no comparison to how crazy Kaka would make female fans during his hey days. He made them fast, marry his pictures, lay out their dupattas for him to walk on and what not!

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“I used to fast every Monday for Rajesh Khanna. And I wasn’t the only one. In fact when he went to a girls’ college, girls did not want him to walk on the road. they used to take off their dupattas and put them on the road for him to walk on,” says Adarsh Wadhwa, 60, who was a college student in Chandigarh in 1969, when Aradhana released.

“I was mad about Rajesh Khanna during my college days. I had married his photograph. I was very upset when he married Dimple and I didn’t eat that day,” says Narinder Kaur, 58, who was a college student in Delhi then.

That's not all. Some ran away from home for him and others kept his photographs in text books to gaze at in class. Says 56-year-old Kavita Sinha, “There was no bigger star than him. We tried to watch every movie of his. I used to read in newspapers that whenever he went out in Bombay, his car was covered with lipstick stains.”