Delhi, Feb 28: Superstars may come and superstars may go, but there is none to rival Dilip Kumar. So contends Lord Meghnad Desai, whose eulogy to the superstar has been released in Delhi this week. Nostalgia is nice once in a while. For Lord Meghnad Desai, that `while' is here and now. It extends across 138 pages of unadulterated praise. Most disparaging about himself regarding film criticism, the man is honest. Honest about his understanding of films, honest about his passion for Hindi films. He is also nostalgic about the first day-first show films he watched back in the 1950s and early `60s, the films youngsters often had to see to find out if they were `safe' for adults to see! "I watched them `live'. They were the films of my generation. I don't count watching a film on DVD as entertainment," he recounts. Wait. This is no old man yearning for the days of yore, always infusing an element of retrospective respectability into an age when society was still in a flux and the nation was just born. This is famous economist Lord Meghnad Desai himself writing about films, confessing his passion for them in an age when watching Hindi films was looked down upon. Yet he claims to have watched the Dilip Kumar-Raj Kapoor-Nargis-starrer "Andaaz" no less than 15 times. And he started real young. All of six, and he went to see Dilip Kumar's films in 1946. He pulls no punches. He is a Dilip Kumar fan. Simple. No arguments. There may have been a Raj Kapoor or Dev Anand in the same generation. There may be Rajesh Khanna or Amitabh Bachchan later. But for Desai, acting begins and ends with Dilip Kumar, "Nehru's hero in the life of India". "He was truly the hero of the time when Nehru was forming India. India was being formed as a nation and every nation has a story to tell. Dilip Kumar's films took the story forward. I have watched his films since I was six and he has remained my idol," confesses Desai, who has just penned a eulogy to the actor, titled - what else? - "Nehru's Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India" published by Roli Books. "Though Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, Dev Anand and others had their own following, Dilip Kumar was different. He was an icon in every sense of the word. Before Dilip Kumar no Muslim had gone on to rise to a dominant position in Hindi films. There were people like Chandramohan, Sohrab Modi, K.L. Saigal and others. All the heroes were either Hindus or Parsees. Dilip Kumar broke that stereotype. When he came to Bombay" - Desai still prefers to call it Bombay having grown up with that, not Mumbai - "Bombay Talkies' Devika Rani offered him three names: Jahangir, Vasudeva and Dilip Kumar. Yusuf Saab opted for Dilip Kumar probably because it went pretty similar to Ashok Kumar who was a popular actor then." It was not just the change of name for Yusuf. It was change of identity for possible popular acceptance. "His father called acting as bhaande ka dhanda. However, Yusuf took the name for commercial reasons," says Desai, adding, "He never played a Muslim till `Mughal-e-Azam'. He also never had a moustache till this film.