Michael Jackson personified the impossible: Amitabh Bachchan

NEW DELHI - Pop legend Michael Jackson was the “incredible perfection that god could have possibly created” and a man who personified “the impossible”, says Hindi film megastar Amitabh Bachchan.

“He (Michael) changed the very psyche of not just the kind of music he was making, but also the psyche of the listening audience. Nothing compared to him. He was just this incredible perfection that god could have possibly created in his mercy,” Amitabh posted on his blog Friday.

“His body moved like a wound up toy machine. Every conceivable action of rhythm and style was incorporated inside his diminutive form without any blemish. The exhilaration that he provided became synonymous with the ultimate. He was the impossible,” he added.

The news of 50-year-old Jackson’s demise Thursday following a cardiac arrest at his home in Los Angeles took Amitabh down memory lane.

“In the mid 60s or thereabouts, I heard a group of pop singers who went by the name of ‘The Jackson Five’…the youngest among them was this chubby cute little fellow with an extraordinary voice and a body that for his age and countenance moved exceptionally well. I found out his name was Michael - Michael Jackson.

“It was around the mid 70s that lightening struck and from it emerged this grown up version of Michael Jackson, singing, moving, dancing like he was from some other planet,” wrote Amitabh who had a chance meeting with the man himself.

The megastar’s first tryst with the King of Pop, who became a rage amongst people cutting across all ages and strata, was after 1982, the year Amitabh had an accident on the sets of his film “Coolie”.

Amitabh had gone to the US for recuperation and consultation with doctors there on his post-operative condition and happened to learn that Jackson was to perform at a concert the next day. He did everything he could to watch the show and when he finally got to experience it, he says it was “hallucinogenic madnes”.

In the early 1990s in New York, Amitabh had Jackson knocking at his door.

“The door bell of my room in the Helmsley Palace Hotel rang and I sauntered up to open it. There as I stood in the doorway, across me, was Michael Jackson. He looked a little surprised as he turned around to those he was accompanied with and in his now well known soft voice gently spoke up - ‘Oh! Excuse me! I think I have the wrong room’,” said Amitabh.

Later of course, the two legends met again and “exchanged pleasant conversation”.

“He was soft spoken, very humble and most polite. I never saw him again, but when he came to perform in Mumbai (in 1996) at the Andheri Sports Complex, Prateeksha, where I live, shook the entire night with the vibrations of all his most popular numbers booming out from the venue.

“An exceptional artist has gone. Someone that created an almost outer world experience for all of us with his art,” Amitabh wrote.