The year was 1984, We had one TV channel — Doordarshan. DD had popped into our lives– for want of any alternative, we gorged on it, whatever fare was offered. Eighties British sitcoms like Yes Minister, Fawlty Towers and To the Manor Born, regaled us in the evenings — and our own homegrown Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi. Shafi Inamdar and Swaroop Sampat gave us the base, as a typical middle-class family in Bombay, dealing with everyday problems. But it was one Satish Shah, playing 55 different parts in the 55 episodes that the show ran, who gave us the gravy, the icing on the cake — different and varied finely etched characters in every episode. From a groom’s father to a goonda, from a priest to a police inspector -- he played every conceivable type of “common man”, floating into the lives of Shafi and Swaroop. He shifted seamlessly between accents and attire, to showcase Bombay’s vast communities, giving us the full array of his comedy of all kinds, broad, to subtle. Satish Shah could manage the length and breadth of comedy, the slapstick, the tomfoolery, the double take, the funny accents, the physical comedy. In a time of early sitcoms, and canned laughter, Satish flew close to the edge of stereotype, but his ability to embody that very stereotype with energy and empathy, gave us immortal characters.

Satish Shah had a similar problem to Asrani, who passed two weeks before Shah, as they weren’t conventionally good looking, in fact they were odd looking, by Hindi movie standards.