Today is Parveen Babi’s 71’s birth anniversary, My only fav actress & below is a breathtaking story about this diva from her private and professional lifestyle.

She is still Most glamorous actresses throughout Hindi cinema but her life is more than it.

She was born in Junagadh in a muslim family who belonged to Babi tribe of Pashtuns that had long settled in Gujarat, known as the Pathans of Gujarat.

She did her early schooling from Mount Carmel High School, Ahmedabad and later attended St. Xavier's College, Ahmedabad.

Where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English literature. Parveen was born fourteen years after the marriage of her parents and was their only child. She lost her father at the age of ten.

Director B R Ishara discovered her in a chance meeting.

CC: @vivekagnihotri

Despite having no success to her credit, a chubby-cheeked Parveen, who looked younger than her age, found instant acceptance and surprised everyone by being snapped up for nine more films.

But it was Parveen's small but crucial role in Yash Chopra's Deewar (1975)...

... that was largely responsible for formulating her image as the sleek, chic, Western woman whose long, open tresses, flying wildly in the wind, became an unspoken expression of her desire to be unshackled by convention, both on and off screen.

Imagine a superstar, who epitomised the bold, the beautiful, reportedly being handcuffed and ankle-cuffed & carried by four policemen from the JFK airport in New York to a mental hospital because she refused to go through the customary checks growing uncontrollably hysterical…

Parveen reportedly suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which triggered a systematic disintegration of her personality and life.

Unfortunately She had a series of failed relationships with Danny Denzongpa, Kabir Bedi , Amitabh bacchan and most importantly Mahesh Bhatt.

What could be more heartbreaking than a superstar having to identify herself?

Six years after she fled to the USA to seek refuge in philosopher and guru UG Krishnamurthy, she walked down the Mumbai airport tarmac in November 1989 holding a placard that read ‘Parveen Babi’.

She knew her longtime secretary Ved Sharma, who was there to receive her, wouldn’t be able to recognise her.
Her most intense relationship was with Mahesh Bhatt.

He was a struggler then and she a big-time actress. (Woh Lamhe Movie)

@GujaratHistory

Incidentally, when Parveen first felt something snapping within her, she was introduced to guru and philosopher UG Krishnamurthy by Mahesh Bhatt. In September 1979, she quit the industry to follow her guru.

She has spend sometime In Bangalore with Mahesh and UG , away from inds.

In July 1983, at the peak of her career, Parveen abruptly left India to be with UG in the US again. Allegedly, the release of Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth and her disturbed state of mind led her to ditch it all for good. And when she returned from the US again in 1989, she was a different

Due to her paranoia, she lodged police complaints against 34 parties, including co-star Amitabh Bachchan and former US President Bill Clinton. She accused them of conspiring to kill her (the allegations were dismissed due to lack of evidence).

She even filed an affidavit in the court after the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts case, claiming that she had evidence against Sanjay Dutt.

She didn’t trust the doctors. Anyone who suggested she should see a psychiatrist became her enemy, even her mother!

In short she got a full blown paranoid schizophrenia. “She had developed this weird habit of putting on a tape recorder when you visited her. She’d switch on the gadget and say into the mike, ‘This is Lalit, Sharmaji’s son with me, the day is…’ and then begin talking.

She was one of the first Indians to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. She was very meticulous about her career.

She was said to have lived lonely and converted to Christianity during the late 1990s and also ate pork because she considered not eating pork racist.

Finally, Parveen Wali Mohammed Khan Babi was buried next to her mother at Santa Cruz, Mumbai on January 23, 2005. But to all those who once knew her, she had died long ago.

In her loving memories will spread information on schizophrenia and borderline personality today.