Book Review: Prem Naam Hai Mera, Prem Chopra by Rakita Nanda

I’ll keep this review short.

A biography or an autobiography is a curated depiction of someone’s real life. And this is Indian actor and famous Bollywood villain Prem Chopra’s badly written and sycophantic biography.

While ‘Prem Naam Hai Mera, Prem Chopra’ is written by Prem Chopra’s daughter Rakita Nanda, the story follows first person narrative. I wonder if the book was such a sanitized version of his life because his daughter has written it.

Two things are drilled into the reader’s mind. First, that he was a very handsome man, implying that he had every potential to become a hero rather than a villain. Second, that he is a very good human being, implying that his on-screen persona is in stark contrast to his off-screen persona.

There are too many fillers in this book. Pages and pages are filled with the list of Prem Chopra’s films with detailed description of the movie plots, his best roles and his famous dialogues. Wikipedia does an excellent job in educating about movie plots and characters. There was no need to include it in the book in such detail. I skipped through a lot of pages, which I very rarely do.

Few of the interesting bits were his early years, anecdotes about the first few years in Mumbai when he used to work with the Times of India and the impact of his villainous image on his personal life. 

I suggest that you either buy a second-hand copy or borrow it from a library or read it for free on Kindle with the Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription, like I did (not an endorsement).

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Title: Prem Naam Hai Mera, Prem Chopra

Author: Rakita Nanda

Publication: 2014

Language: English

Pages: 248

Rating: 2/5