Affable, charming talented Raj Kiran who celebrates his birthday on 5 February and who won numerous hearts in Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth and Subhash Ghai’s Karz , has been missing for over 30 years.
His Karz co-star Rishi Kapoor had tracked Raj down in the US in 2011 and that was the last we heard of Raj. Rishi found out Raj Kiran, alive in a mental institution in Atlanta. For someone who was remembered as an engaging, polite and cultured actor, it was shocking that his rumoured death could gather momentum so easily. During his trip, Rishi Kapoor met the missing actor’s brother Govind Mehtani.
Rishi had been wondering what had happened to Raj Kiran. He was relieved to know Raj was alive.
Rishi said to me, “The question was haunting me for a very long time. Then these rumours of Raj being no more began doing the rounds. I was really disturbed. How can a colleague with whom I shared some really good times, just vanish from the face of earth? I decided to look up Raj’s elder brother Govind Mehtani to find out about Raj.”
It was then that the shocking truth about Raj Kiran spilled out. Govind told Rishi that Raj was alive. But he was confined to an institution in Atlanta due to health problems. Apparently Raj paid for his own treatment in Atlanta by working within the institution.
Rishi remembered Raj as very well read and clever with his repartees. It seems Raj went through a series of domestic crises which left him in a state of acute depression. He was apparently institutionalised in India before he left for the US. Though Raj has not been working for a long time, he invested well. So he was not financially challenged by his illness.
The actor, whose dazzling smile had lit up many potboilers for two decades, giving remarkable performances in films like B R Ishara’s Kagaz Ki Nao, Ghar Ho To Aisa with Anil Kapoor, Meenakshi Sheshadri and Deepti Naval and Kaaran apart from Subhash Ghai’s hit Karz and Mahesh Bhatt’s critically acclaimed Arth in the 1980s, had vanished for almost a decade.
Mahesh Bhatt had worked with Raj Kiran in Arth and at that time he had never given him any reason to believe that he would ever suffer from such an organic problem. But then years later Mahesh heard about bizarre incidents that happened in Bangalore. Raj Kiran had gone to Puttaparthi and there he apparently, tried to scale a wall and got violent and was accused of having attempted to assassinate Sai Baba. He was brought back to Mumbai where he was kept in a Byculla asylum. Mahesh had gone to meet him there. Some time after that Mahesh heard his brother took him to the USA.
