Bollywood director Kundan Shah, who passed away this morning of a heart attack at home, was known for films like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron(1983), Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1993) and TV shows like Nukkad (1986) and Wagle Ki Duniya (1988). His last film P Se PM Tak released in 2014. Shah, who studied cinema at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, was 70. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron was his first film as a director and is considered one of the classics of Hindi cinema and an early Bollywood satirical comedy. Shah won the National Award for Best First Film of a Director for the same.

In one of his rare interviews, Shah told a national daily in June 2015 he was working on a sequel to Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. It was a cult film, after all, a dark satire on the rampant corruption in politics, the bureaucracy, media and business world. Corruption hadn’t faded away. And, he believed, the country had slipped into darker times that when his protagonists in JBDY Vinod Chopra (Naseeruddin Shah) and Sudhir Mishra (Ravi Baswani) lived. “Now there are many more unscrupulous and corrupt people like my antagonists, the builder Tarneja (Pankaj Kapur) and municipal commissioner D’Mello (Satish Shah), in comparison to when JBDY got made,” Shah said.

Talking about his greatest hit, Shah revealed that JBDY could not have been made without National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) support. “It cost just Rs. 7 lakh to make in 1983,” he said. “The committee didn’t question the script written by Sudhir Mishra and me at all. No questions were asked as to why Akbar comes into a scene which starts off with Mahabharat. The biggest blessing is that we had the freedom to go wrong, the freedom to fail, and that was very important.”

Despite this cult film, Bollywood didn’t give Shah another chance to make sense of or poke fun at the Indian political scene. His films Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa and Kya Kehna were successful, but Shah’s real forte – political satire – was not tested again. The filmmaker had said ruefully then, “They believe in vigilante films. I don’t think vigilantes can change society. Through such films the audience gets a chance to release its frustration. It gives them vicarious pleasure. I firmly believe that films do affect society. I started smoking after watching films. In Hollywood the heroes were sponsored by the brands.”

But Shah was not bitter about the lack of opportunities to make other political satires. “A painter makes only one film, a writer writes only one novel, it reflects the way they look at the world. Story is just the body; you bare your soul only once. After that the idea is to get more purified. To make your art sharper and richer. Some filmmakers are lucky to get opportunities. Others are victims of circumstances.”