With Doordarshan’s Buniyaad and Zee’s Tara, Alok Nath became the biggest superstar of the small screen. The behind-the-scenes peccadilloes during the shooting of Tara were far more interesting than anything that we saw on screen. The serial’s superstar pair, Navneet Nishan and Alok Nath, couldn’t stand each other and were constantly bickering and arguing. On a number of occasions, they nearly came to blows on the sets.
Oh, how we loved hearing about Tara and her tyrannical co-star’s ongoing battle.
Matters came to such a pass that the serial’s producers and creative heads had to choose between the two — Navneet or Alok. Since Navneet played the title role and — let’s face it — was more popular than her co-star, Alok was written out of Tara.
Practically everyone associated with Tara, including the talented writer Vinta Nanda, sided with Navneet, thereby isolating Alok Nath to the extent that he went from being a household name to a persona non grata. But the image of the holier-than-thou patriarch, who drank Gangajal after sundown, was stuck with him.
Alok Nath was given the ‘Sanskari Babuji’ image from pre-“Tara” stint on the hugely successful Doordarshan serial Buniyaad, where he played the patriarch Haveli Ram to perfection.
Alok hated the goody-goody image and told me: “I’d do anything to escape the image of the saintly patriarch. That isn’t me. I like my share of fun. I am like any normal person.”
He temporarily escaped Haveli Ram’s clutches by playing the rakish entrepreneur Deepak Seth in Tara. But the Sanskari image wouldn’t leave him. After struggling with bit roles in a series of forgotten films, Alok Nath finally rediscovered his bearings in Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum …Aapke Hain Koun.
This time, the image of the benign Babuji stuck. Nothing that Alok would do would eradicate that image. Recently, he played a very naughty non-Sanskari patriarch in Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety. But to no avail.
“I guess I am destined to be stuck with this image,” he sighed when I told him audiences won’t accept him as a rogue.
Alok Nath found the notoriety that he was subconsciously craving for when he was accused by writer-director Vinta Nanda of rape. The Sanskari Babuji’s image was finally been crushed to the ground.