Chacha Nehru with Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand & Raj Kapoor

Sometime back, an interesting query from someone:

Ritu Nanda's book about her father, 'Raj Kapoor: speaks' has (above given) photograph of Nehru with Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor. It mentions the year as 1968, which is definitely wrong since Nehru died in 1964. The image is missing in 2nd edition of the book. When was the photograph taken and who took it?

I get all kinds of queries and requests, most of them next to impossible. This one too was impossible.

Figuring out the date turned out to be easy. Google image search (that now lets you search the web for images using as reference an image that may be sitting on your system) lead to this fine gallery where the image had a name ending with 1958 (I try to follow the same convention while uploading images).

So the year was 1958. But the real difficult part was finding the name of the photographer. In a case like this finding the culprit is next to impossible. I kept the case as unsolved.

Then recently a friend sent in photoshots of March 8, 1963 issue of Filmfare. As a looked at the grainy images celebrating 50 years of Indian cinema, in a corner of the last image I came across this line:

"The photographs of Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor with Mr. Nehru in our February 22 issue are by Kewal Mehra."