When Rishi Kapoor admitted to having ‘illogical dislike’ for Rajesh Khanna: ‘Dimple is going to kill me…’

The late actor Rishi Kapoor admitted to having an ‘illogical dislike’ for the late actor Rajesh Khanna. He revealed the reason in a 2017 interview while promoting his book Khullam Khulla.

In the interview, Rishi was asked about his equation with Rajesh Khanna, which he had also written about in the book. He said that ‘one of the reasons’ that he didn’t like Rajesh Khanna involved a ring given to him by a woman he was involved with.

He told NDTV, “Dimple is going to kill me if I bring this up… But it’s fine, Kakaji is no more. I probably disliked him because he took away my heroine. So there was a kind of… I felt bad about the fact. Otherwise there was no ill feelings, I worked with him a lot. I even directed him in a film.”

Rishi wrote in his book about the incident that could have partially inspired the supposed animosity. He wrote that when him and Dimple Kapadia were shooting Bobby, he was seeing a woman named Yasmin. Yasmin had given him a ring with a peace sign on it, which Dimple took from him and started wearing. It was around that time that she got involved with Rajesh Khanna, who didn’t appreciate the fact that she was wearing a ring that belonged to Rishi. And so he took the ring off her finger and hurled it into the sea.

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Rishi said that the ring wasn’t very expensive, but it meant a lot to him. “She flicked it from me,” he said, asked how it came to be in Dimple’s possession. He said that this was one of the reasons he didn’t like Rajesh Khanna: “He got rid of my ring, he took away my heroine, got married to her, so obviously there were enough reasons for me.”

Rishi died in 2020 after a two-year battle with cancer. Rajesh Khanna died in 2012.