Film director Jagmohan Mundhra passes away

Film director Jagmohan Mundhra passed away in Mumbai on Sunday, family sources said. He was 62.

Mundhra, who was in the hospital for the last three days, suffered a major cardiac arrest.

His cremation will be held at the Shivaji Park cemetery, Dadar at 6.30 pm on Sunday.

Born on October 29, 1948 at Nagpur, Mundhra was known for issue-oriented films such as Bawandar, which had Nandita Das in leading role, and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan-starrer Provoked.

An alumni of IIT Mumbai, Mundhra went to US to study electrical engineering but switched to marketing studies, and wrote a comparative thesis on marketing practises of Hollywood and Bollywood.

After finishing his PhD he also taught for a year at California State University. His stay in California brought him closer to Hollywood. In 1979 he decided to become a full time filmmaker.

His last directorial venture was Naughty@40, starring Govinda, and he was about to start shooting Kissa Kutte Ka, a political satire starring Tannishtha Chatterjee, Seema Biswas, Sarika and Raghubir Yadav.

Mundhra had over 30 films to his credit. After his debut film Suraag (1982), he directed a string of horror and erotic thrillers in Hollywood, including The Jigsaw Murders (1988), Halloween Night (1988), Night Eyes (1990), LA Goddess (1993), Sexual Malice (1994) and Tales of the Kama Sutra 2: Monsoon (1998).

Mundhra grew up in a Marwari locality in Kolkata, in a conservative family where films were frowned upon. But, he nurtured a secret ambition of becoming a filmmaker when his young contemporaries dreamt of being cricket players or film stars.

His childhood was a tough one, counting pennies for the tram that rode to the other, affluent side of the city, and withstanding his family's strict traditions.

Mundhra once said, "The family was very conservative and my grandmother was very strict and we were allowed to see maybe a couple of films a year and that too of the Har Har Mahadev variety. As a child, I never saw myself as a young Marwari boy but a lot beyond that. In those days, the word global citizen was not there, but inside I felt like one".

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