Veteran actor and Bollywood legend Dharmendra passed away recently at the age of 89. Sunny Deol and Bobby Deol had organised a special prayer meeting to honour his legacy at a Mumbai hotel. On the same
day, Hema Malini held a Gita path at home and was not seen at the hotel prayer meet. A few days later, Hema held a prayer meet in Delhi, which Sunny and Bobby did not attend. Shobhaa De, in a recent chat, said that Hema Malini was left out by Prakash Kaur’s (Dharmendra’s first wife) family.
In a chat with Barkha Dutt, Shobhaa said, “Must have been a particularly difficult and hard decision… To be totally left out by the first family from something that she had spent 45 years of her own life… Nourishing, cherishing, which had enriched her life.”
She added, “She had two daughters from this marriage. It must have hurt terribly, but she kept all that for her own privacy. However she wished to deal with it, and when she did have a public function, I thought she conducted it with utmost dignity, not just for herself but for the person she had lost.”
Shobhaa said that while Hema could have “hijacked those emotional moments”, she chose dignity over “one-upmanship”. She said, “Given the fact that Hema is a towering personality herself, the idea that she chose dignity over making a public display of one-upmanship, I think, says a lot about her character.”
“She could so easily have, in a way, it’s not a nice word but, hijacked those emotional moments right after Dharam ji passed away. The media would have loved to cover every tear and every gasp that she may have taken and intruded into her privacy and completely stripped her of the dignity that obviously matters so much to her,” Shobhaa said.
She added, “He had two parallel families. A primary family and her, but at no point had either of them disengaged or disowned one another as husband and wife. So I think she chose well, she chose like Hema Malini.”
