Simi Garewal, India’s Oprah in white is coming back. But is Karan Johar generation ready?

Simi Garewal’s ability to listen to her subjects, sing with them, giggle with them, and even cry with them made Rendezvous compulsive viewing.

Simi Garewal | YouTube

In the era before Karan Johar, there was Simi Garewal, a vision in white everyone surrendered to on TV.

Over five seasons and 140 episodes of Rendezvous with Simi Garewal on Star Plus, J. Jayalalithaa famously sang Aaja sanam madhur chandni main hum, Ratan Tata opened up about his bond with J.R.D. Tata, Rekha talked about being called “kutti cheez” and “patakhi”, and Sharmila Tagore smilingly told her about how “phoney” she used to be, and how she learnt to be “I am, what I am” thanks to husband Tiger Pataudi.

Simi Garewal is India’s Oprah Winfrey in white. With her whispering words, soft light, and hand-holding, she was TV’s part-therapist, part-soul sister. Neither her hair nor her words were ever out of place. She was rarely irreverent or catty. She was the epitome of pure, undiluted, unquestioning empathy. “Her guests remained the subject of great intrigue, interest and curiosity at a time when we didn’t have social media to get a glimpse of their lives,” says Shunali Khullar Shroff, author of the all-consuming Love in the Time of Affluenza. “It was the closest we could come to knowing these people intimately, right in our living rooms.”

But Simi is too manicured and propah to be the stars’ 4am BFF or slide into their DMs like Karan Johar can. The stars, however, know that she would never joke about them behind their back or say an unkind word. In the post-social media era, Simi has got a raw deal, being the butt of memes and gifs. The world of celebrities itself has changed, with the divine right of stars becoming history and our gods and goddesses coming down to earth.

With her website, which has all episodes of her show, getting 100 million-plus views, Simi Garewal is now returning with a new season of Rendezvous on her YouTube channel. About time perhaps. Buzz is that she has got Bollywood’s ‘It-couple’ Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh to open the show – their first joint interview since they got married last November. Clearly, she still has the star power that draws other stars.

She got everyone talking

Karan Johar’s Koffee with Karan, after a marathon six seasons, has become less of a convivial chat show and more of a gladiatorial arena where reputations are felled or created. Television’s other great interviewer Karan Thapar, he of the shark smile and sharp questions, is too urbane for the current jungle that is news television. And Akshay Kumar is available only for nationalistic movies and “aam aadmi” interviews with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Simi’s ability to listen to her subjects, sing with them, giggle with them, and even cry with them made her show compulsive viewing. Director Shekhar Kapur who shot his episode with his then wife Suchitra Krishnamurthy and without his famous beard in 2001 says he still gets fan mail for it after all these years. “It was the first of the personality shows in India,” he says. “Everything else followed later.” And though Simi is 71 now, millennial is not an age, it’s an attitude – as the 2019 Lok Sabha election results have shown.

Simi has always been a name to reckon with. And why not? She got Raj Kapoor to talk frankly about Nargis in her documentary on him, Living Legend Raj Kapoor. Here, he is talking about how he first met her and then went back to his writer Inder Raj Anand and told him: “I must have her”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2HHB3ATU6s

And, she got Rajiv Gandhi to talk about Sonia being close to his mother Indira in her documentary on him, spliced together from over 500 hours of footage shot over four years of travelling in his private plane. “She is very tough but she is also very much like I was when I was much younger. She doesn’t like coming into the spotlight… She is very introverted,” Rajiv said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1__XkqdH3I

Simi and cinema

Simi had the ability to ask hard questions to film stars and soft questions to politicians and businessmen. It didn’t hurt that she knew most of them socially and professionally. She had a posh accent (courtesy an education at an English school Newland House). She dated the who’s who and was happy to talk about it – from Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi to the Maharaja of Jamnagar. And she famously stripped to torment poor Rishi Kapoor in Mera Naam Joker (1970) and had nude scenes with Shashi Kapoor in Conrad Rooks’ controversial Siddhartha (1972).

Despite this, she wasn’t exactly the toast of bohemian Bollywood or even the first choice for casting when it came to Westernised, “modern” women roles, which usually went to Parveen Babi (Deewaar) or Zeenat Aman (Don). Although it didn’t stop Simi from being cast as a tribal girl with a yen for liquor in Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri (1970) or as the divorced ad executive sheltering a Naxal fugitive in her Kolkata home at the height of the movement in Mrinal Sen’s Padatik (1973).

In popular culture, though, she will forever be remembered for her role as the killer wife in Subhash Ghai’s reincarnation melodrama Karz (1980). Raise your hands all of you who cheered when Monty (a reconstructed Raj Kiran, played by Rishi Kapoor) wreaked vengeance on Kamini Verma.

Posh and not an auntyji

In real life, she is unapologetic about being posh. “When I’d wear an Armani, they’d ask me if he was a Sindhi designer!” she once said. On another occasion, she said she was never accepted by female co-stars like Vyjayanthimala and Asha Parekh because of her accent. “(They) gave me a hard time by deliberately messing up my tough scenes,” she said. She also infamously said she saw Pakistani flags in the slums near the Race Course in Mahalaxmi in Mumbai, although she did apologise for this later.

Her style of questioning may be gentle but her research is tough and exacting. “You have to know everything about them so you are in control and so they can’t surprise you,” Garewal once told Priya Ramani, who was then with India Today. For instance, she spent a year researching on Viswanathan Anand before interviewing him.

And consumed a lot of information about the Emergency when she questioned Maneka Gandhi about husband Sanjay’s role in it. She managed to get many nuggets out of Maneka, including how the Emergency was not Sanjay’s idea.

Shobhaa De recalls how she and her husband were Simi’s very first guinea pigs in 1997. “She shot her pilot episode with us. Back then what impressed me greatly was her thoroughness. She conducts her research meticulously and is very sure about what she wants to convey through her show. Simi connects effortlessly with any age group. I have no doubt another generation of viewers will plug into her Rendezvous. She always has the pulse and stays relevant.”

Simi vowed never to play auntyji, and has lived life on her terms with her sister and her dogs. As she said in an interview to Filmfare: “Seriously speaking, I’ve got several offers but nothing has excited me. Also, I’ll never do auntyji kind of roles because I don’t believe I am one.”

Will her gentle but firm SoBo style work in the rough and tumble of New India with its Hinglish-speaking stars, increasingly humourless politicians and fugitive businessmen? Speak so I can see your soul, goes her theme song. Will her celebrity subjects comply in these carefully choreographed times?

The author is a senior journalist. Views are personal.