Conversion, Peace Nobel and a birthday boy called Dilip Kumar

Actor Dilip Kumar turns 92 today. I am trying to imagine how his morning today would have looked like. The man - feel free to call him actor par excellence, a legend, and a remarkable symbol of what used to be an inclusive India - may have gingerly walked to his door to pick the newspaper. Or may be the adoring wife Saira Banu did the honours. Doesn't matter.

What matters is what the thespian read on his big day. His heart may have warmed to the story of an Indian and a Pakistani sharing what is arguably the most noble prize in the world. To read Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai together as they dream of a world our children can be proud of must have given some hope to the man who epitomised hope for a newly-independent India.

That Dilip saab used to be (or still is) Yusuf Khan and a Pakistani-born Indian remains one of the most enduring subtexts of the saga that his long and eventful life has been.

I am worried about what Dilip saab may have read next. The raging row over the forced or misleading conversion of 200 vulnerable Muslims from a slum in Agra into Hinduism. They may have denied embracing a new religion, but the juggernaut that has rolled now threatens to once again run over the delicate social fabric of the nation.

The RSS and their mentee, the BJP, are thumping their chests as they wage yet another round of assault on India's weakest. Adityanath, the poster boy of militant Hindutva known for the unprecedented and unfortunate Parliament statements calling for a Hindu India, continues to remain defiant and says he plans more trouble in Aligarh.

They call it "ghar wapasi". For a man from Pakistan who has no reasons to think of India as anything else, the expression may have produced a lament, and a nostalgia for the nation that used to be. The tragedy king would have felt like a dwarf if he compared the tragedies he faced on screen with the idea of a secular India today. How must the ultimate method actor feel about the method in Sangh's madness?

Conversion for Dilip Kumar must be an ironic resonance. Did Devika Rani convert the young actor from Peshawar when she gave him a Hindu name? What followed that baptisation into a certain majoritarian imagination of a national hero is only one of the most enduring chapters of Indian cinema. Read together with the dominance of a few Khans in Bombay cinema five decades after Dilip Kumar was born only confirms another enduring image of an inclusive India.

On this day, as the greatest actor of India looks forward to - and deservedly so - a bright, sunny day in Mumbai, let the images on his television not haunt him on the twilight of his life. The schizophrenia of a nation celebrating his legacy and refusing to ignore the lunacy of a dangerous idea that he stood against will be too much to bear for the old man.

He, and his India, deserve better.