As the news of veteran Bollywood actor Manoj Kumar’s death wafted across the media platforms, the top-of-the mind recall was his popular identity as ‘Mr. Bharat’, which was his own owing to a series of ‘nation first’ films which cemented his slot in Bollywood.

In 1965, at the age of 28, with a few romantic hits behind him and a rising career among the post-Independence young population, Manoj Kumar, born Harikrishan Giri Goswami, acted in his first of the films – ‘Shaheed’ - which firmly placed patriotism above everything else, blending it with typical Indian cultural values and traditions as a way of life. By then, he had a standing in the celluloid circles as an emerging romantic hero with a few hits in that genre.