Dark Star

With seventeen blockbuster hits in succession, starting with Aradhana (1969), and mass adulation rarely seen before or since, the world was at Khanna''s feet. Everything he touched turned to gold. The hysteria he generated—women writing him letters in blood, marrying his photograph and donning white when he married Dimple Kapadia, people bringing sick children for his ''healing'' touch after Haathi Mere Saathi (1971)—was unparalleled. Then, in a matter of months, it all changed. Khanna''s career hit a downward spiral as spectacular as his meteoric rise, just three years after Aradhana, and from this he never really recovered.