When Saroj Khan recalled her journey from being a child star to a legendary choreographer- watch video

Veteran choreographer Saroj Khan passed away on Friday (July 3) due to cardiac arrest. She was 71. On June 20, Saroj Khan was admitted to Guru Nanak Hospital at Bandra, after she complained of breathing problems. Bollywood celebs like Madhuri Dixit, Akshay Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, and others have mourned the death of the ace choreographer.

Saroj Khan started working from a very tender age. In the talk show TEDx TALKS, Saroj talked about her journey from Pakistan to India and how she became a child star in Bollywood. She said, “My name is Saroj Khan and I choreograph songs in the film industry and also on stage. I have experience of you can call it 67 years because I started my career at the age of 3. I won’t say that my family belongs to any music or are there any artists in my family, they were only business people and my parents were in Pakistan. We stayed there, they were very rich people but as it happens in life, a tragedy that took place in 1947- it was a partition and my parents came to India as refugees. Whatever they had with them was only gold, money and clothes, but that also, like a filmy story, the bags got changed, somebody took our bags and left dirty clothes in the other bag. But that tragedy struck twice. They landed in Bombay, I wasn’t born, I was born in Mumbai-1948.”

Saroj said that when she was three years old, her mother saw her making hands in shadow. Her mother who was pregnant with the second child took Saroj to the doctor and said that she thinks Saroj is retarded as she looked at the shadows. “So the doctor said she might be wanting to dance. He played music and I did something like that and the doctor said this child is normal but only thing is she wants to dance and you all are poor people, why don’t you put her in the film industry,” said Saroj Khan.

“I will not say I had an ambition, I think God gave them this child because God wanted me to support my family and from there, my career started as a child star which lasted nine years, till then they had a good room on rent and we survived and I had two sisters more,” she added.

Saroj Khan made a name in Bollywood and won National Award three times in her career.

Also Read: Saroj Khan’s Last Videos: Choreographer urges people to stay home to win battle against Coronavirus