Watch Dr Rahi Masoom Raza’s hilarious Gol Maal dialogues

The plot of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Gol Maal (1979) veers from the comical to priceless. A young man, Ramprasad Sharma, in his first ever job lands an impossible boss. To please his employer’s eccentricities, he has to invent a twin brother, his polar opposite, to keep up appearances. Things go haywire pretty soon and the icing on the cake is the timeless dialogues by Rahi Masoom Raza, who often worked with Mukherjee, including Alaap (1977) and Naram Garam (1981).

Raza was also behind the dialogues for Subhash Ghai’s Karz (1980) and Yash Chopra’s Lamhe (1991). He won three Filmfare awards for Best Dialogues for Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki, Tawaif (1985) and Lamhe, for which he was awarded posthumously. Besides working in films, Raza was an esteemed Hindi and Urdu novelist. In the 1980s, he also wrote the dialogues for the landmark television series, Mahabharat.

For Gol Maal, Raza supplied Utpal Dutt’s moustache-obsessed Bhavani Shankar with gems like, “Jiski mooch saaf hoti hain, uska mann saaf nahi hota [The man who doesn't have a moustache, doesn't have a clean mind]". Amol Palekar, as the long-suffering employee, mouths lines like, “Log apne pairon pe kuladi marte honge, maine toh kuladi pe hi pair mar diya [People generally hit the axe on their feet, I hit my foot on the axe]”. These wonderful dialogues only added to the charm of this everlasting film. Even now, if someone says, “Maaf nahin, main tujhe saaf kar doonga [I will not forgive you, I will clean you out],” everyone knows which scene in the film it belongs to. But they might not know the writer behind these classic lines.

Cinestaan.com has put together a compilation of the film’s best lines written by Dr Rahi Masoom Raza.

Video edited by Ankit Tripathi