By Hindustan Times

Mumbai, Feb. 15 -- Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's celebrated tragicromance novel, Devdas has inspired 11 films in Hindi, Bengali and Tamil by many renowned directors. And it continues to enthuse many like writer Nasreen Munni Kabir, whose latest book, The Dialogue of Devdas: Bimal Roy's Immortal Classic will be launched in the city today.

While dialogues from Roy's 1955 classic are immortalised in this book, it is another Devdas, Shah Rukh Khan, who will release and perhaps even read out a few dialogues at the launch today in presence of the director's family. Co-published by Om Books International and Hyphen Films, the book presents the dialogue in a four-language format. Roy's children, Rinki, Yashodhara, Aparajita and Joy have written a chapter each in this book.

Ask Nasreen the relevance of a book on the iconic, lovelorn protagonist in contemporary times and she feels it's a way of preserving the history of Indian cinema. She explains, "Rajinder Singh Bedi, who wrote the dialogue of this film was a very famous Urdu writer and it's important for us to have an example of his writing for the cinema, which was very emotionally expressive. The dialogue gives you the psychology of the character."

The writer recalls meeting Bimal Roy's wife Manu while making a documentary on him in the 1987, and subsequently doing an interview with Dilip Kumar, who played the lead in the classic film. Talking about Devdas, who has been a subject of discussion and has almost become an adjective to describe a person, she says, "Dilip Kumar once told me: Devdas not only punishes himself, but punishes Parvati as well."