If Bollywood had a family dictionary, the Kapoors would probably need several volumes. There is Bebo, Lolo, Chintu, Dabboo and Chimpu, names that sound less like the members of one of Hindi cinema’s most influential dynasties and more like characters from a children’s television show. But these were the people before they became the Kapoors we know.
Take Karisma Kapoor. The woman who arrived in the 1990s as one of Bollywood’s biggest female stars was Lolo long before she became Karisma Kapoor. The name has an interesting origin: it was inspired by Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida.
Her younger sister got a shorter, rather more mysterious-sounding name. Kareena became Bebo. Their father Randhir Kapoor wanted the sisters’ pet names to rhyme, and Bebo was born.
What makes it particularly amusing is how completely the name survived Kareena’s transformation into one of Bollywood’s biggest stars. Bebo didn’t disappear when Kareena grew up. If anything, the public adopted it.
Today, “Bebo” can be dropped into a headline without anybody asking who you’re talking about.
The Kapoor boys had their own vocabulary. Rishi Kapoor was Chintu. His brother Randhir was Dabboo, while Rajiv was Chimpu. And if those names sound like they belong to a completely different family from the one that produced Bobby, Henna, Prem Granth and generations of Bollywood stars, that may be precisely the charm of it.
The names weren’t meant for the world. They were meant for home.
Then came Ranbir Kapoor. By the time he entered the family business, the Kapoors had already accumulated enough nicknames to fill a school register. Yet his mother Neetu Kapoor found another one for him: Raymond.
It sounds particularly funny today because Ranbir’s public persona is so firmly established. But that’s exactly what makes these names interesting. The nickname doesn’t care about the star. It belongs to the person underneath. And perhaps that is the one thing that connects the entire Kapoor nickname universe.
Before the surname Kapoor carried a certain weight, before the children grew up knowing that films were almost a family inheritance, they were simply Dabboo, Chintu, Chimpu, Lolo and Bebo. The public eventually learnt their professional names. The family never really needed to.
And perhaps that’s why the Kapoors’ nicknames have survived so well. They don’t sound like celebrity names. They sound like home. And the Kapoors aren’t the only Bollywood family whose private names eventually became part of its mythology.
