How To Get a Love Letter From The Stars

“I received your wishes for my birthday. I can barely explain how your letter made my heart dance with happiness."

Social media has brought the stars down to Earth (the celebrity variety, of course, though many of them certainly act as if they are as big as a real star).

This sort of open sharing with fans has many pluses, not least being that now almost any star from any field can confidently tell all of their fans what they had for breakfast, imply a certain moral/physical/mental superiority for eating said breakfast, and (presumably) charge some company for the service.

Among the many minuses being that it is not such a big deal when a star interacts with someone. Even Prime Ministers have social media teams who carefully interact with a certain number of ‘normal’ accounts every day. And as people are quickly realising, a tweet is not something you can keep - unless you are the sort to print it out and frame it (I certainly am, but that’s a different story).

This is not to say that stars did not have some notion about PR back in the 1950s. They certainly did, and they also had pre-canned answers all typed up and ready for signing.

But that’s where the magic is, really. It was typed on a piece of paper. At the very least, you know your idol touched it and then signed it. And then you got this paper for yourself, something to hold and keep for the next 50 years. 

Plus, it happened so rarely you could, quite easily, go your entire life being the only person who got such a response among your friends.

It is an experience no selfie can really replace. It is an experience one Mehrunissa Najma had in spades, and every minute spent working on that story kept a silly grin plastered on my face.

As a young girl in the 1960s, Ms Najma had the idea of writing to almost every single Bollywood superstar she could think of. Rather traitorously, she told every one of them, ‘I am your biggest fan,’ - a small lie for which we can forgive her. The responses she got, then preserved, are the stuff of legend.

Have a look -

“I received your wishes for my birthday. I can barely explain how your letter made my heart dance with happiness. I’m sending you a picture with my autograph, and my best wishes. Yours, Dharmendra.”

Najma passed away in 2006. We have her story thanks to the letters she saved and her niece, Sam Javed, who made a viral Twitter thread out of it, and kindly spoke to us about her aunt and shared some of this pictures.

SamSays @samjawed65

My aunt passed away many years ago. Among her belongings was an old album that she was very fond of. The album remained lost for many years, buried somewhere in a storeroom in the basement. It was found again recently during a clean-up. 1/n

This is not one of those ‘big impact’ stories. Neither is it a hero tale. We will get back to those next time. But for now, it is worth it to take a moment and smile at the passion of a young fan and the simpler ways passions could be pursued in an era when our passions were not so commodified.

I hope this brought back some good memories for you and inspired you to save something for the future. You never know!

Regards,

Vinayak Hegde

Managing Editor, The Better India.