Salim Khan, The legend screen-writer of Indian Hindi Cinema

Salim Khan, The legend screen-writer of Indian Hindi Cinema who knew how to evaluate his own potentials.

Born on November 24th 1935, in Indore.  He spent his childhood in his father’s villa as the youngest of all his brothers and sisters.  By the age of 9, he lost his mother to TB.  He barely got the love, affection and care from his mother.  He lost his father when he was 14 years old.  In early years he was playing very good cricket and had a desire to become a cricketer.  As a good evaluator of his own potentials he soon realized that he reached a stagnant point in cricket career, therefore changed his career goal and started flying.  He did 100 hours of flying including one force landing, but was not happy with the routine job of flying as there was no liberty left with the pilot in civilian flying, he saw no scope to expand his creativity.

Around the year 1958, he was attending a marriage ceremony of the son of Mr. Tarachand Barjatya.  In that party, producer K. Amarnath was impressed by the young look of Salim and approached and convinced him to work in Hindi cinema.  That is how he came to Bombay.  Like everyone, he also struggled hard to survive in Bombay and acted as an actor in almost like 25 movies.  After working in so many movies, he again did self-assessment and found that he is not made to be an actor.  He understood that he could conceive a role, convey and portray the characters more efficiently, but he was lacking the art of projection as an actor.  As he came to knew that he could excel better as a director or a writer, he left acting after about 7 to 8 years.

Being very addictive to learning new things and reading, he kept on learning about the industry more and more.   The moment he took the decision to become a writer, he was so confident about his potential that in an interview he told “I knew if I have a knowledge of only 2%, I can tell you that the next best does not know even 1%”.  By that time he somehow knew Mr. Javed Akhtar and the most renowned duo of Indian Cinema started working together, yes the Salim-Javed duo.  Back to back they gave super hit movies like Haathi Mere Sathi, Seeta aur Geeta, Janjeer, Yadoon Ki Baarat, Haath Ki Safai, Deewaar, Sholay, Trishul, Don and Kranti and many more.  They changed the history by writing back to back hit movies and also the fate of writers and directors.  Their best contribution to the screenplay industry was that they broke the barrier and brought out dignity, respect and value to the behind-the-scene writers.  The first movie where the duo writer got more price than the lead actor was Dostana, produced by Yah Johar, in which they were paid 12,50,000 and the highest paid star at that time, Amitav Bachhan was paid 12,00,000.