Arun Khanna was engrossed in photographing nest construction by baya weaver in the Saketri grasslands. “Then I spotted an interesting object on a babul branch: an elongated, blackish, tube-like object. My first thought was amusing: maybe some kid had flung an old bicycle tube up the tree. The ‘tube’ moved. The weavers got agitated. It was a rat snake, manoeuvring to a nest,” recalled Khanna.
He retreated to rusticity, a farm of extravagant simplicity: 27 acres where shady trees and winds were the only air conditioners and the Sinhagad valley mountains (Pune) as the walls of his home. Peacocks come to my farm every morning: 25-30, sometimes 40. A rugged yet sensitive actor. Dressed in khadi and a banyan, gazing lovingly into the eyes of a stricken little bird cupped in his hands. That was a different dimension of a multifaceted actor, volunteer soldier and farmer philanthropist. The late Vishwanath ‘Nana’ Patekar had exerted an escape velocity from Mumbai’s star planet. “In the morning, I don’t need an alarm clock. It is the calls of birds at dawn that awaken me. It brings me an otherworldly ‘sakoon’ (peace),” Patekar once remarked. A son of the soil, Patekar had taken a conscious decision to return to his village roots, to nature as best as a farmhouse that alters pure wilderness possibly can.
A thinking actor, he had famously declared that his last property was an earmarked “12 maunds of dry wood, not wet wood which would send smoke into the eyes of the funeral assembly and create misgivings about me after departure!”
