My father was happy to see Soundtrack promo: Soha

Soha Ali Khan describes Tiger Pataudi catching a promo of her film when in hospital even though the late cricket star wasn’t a movie buff. Read on...

Legendary cricketer Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi breathed his last on September 22, leaving a huge void in the cricket world. Tiger Pataudi, as he was fondly called, wasn’t a movie buff at all, despite his wife, Sharmila Tagore, and two of his children, Saif and Soha Ali Khan, working in the films. Soha revealed, however, that he had managed to catch the trailer of her upcoming movie.

HT Image

“My father went to the hospital on September 1 and that’s when the promos of Soundtrack went on air,” said Soha in an interview three days prior to his demise. “At that time, he wasn’t watching television because he was very anxious about his health. But one night, he couldn’t sleep, and so he switched on the TV.”

Luckily, at that very moment, the trailer of Soha’s film was on air. “My mother messaged me to say, ‘Your father watched the promo and he was very happy to see you in it.’ That made me proud, because he doesn’t watch Hindi films at all,” she added.

Soha termed it a coincidence, adding, “What would you call it other than sheer fluke that when he switched on the TV, he came across a Hindi movie channel with a trailer of my film playing?” Considered one of the best Indian cricketers of all time, Pataudi shied away from the Bollywood spotlight, despite the fact that his wife was a famous heroine in the ’60s and early ’70s.

The 70-year-old former Indian cricket captain was in the intensive care unit (ICU) of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi for over two weeks, battling a serious lung infection. His ill health had also prevented Saif and girlfriend Kareena Kapoor from celebrating her 31st birthday, as Saif rushed to Delhi to be by his father’s bedside. Soha had also cancelled plans to promote Soundtrack, which releases next week.