My jumping, dancing come from Ganapati: Jeetendra

Veteran actor Jeetendra, known as the 'Jumping Jack of Bollywood', owes his dancing skills to the days he spent celebrating Ganesh Utsav as a kid.

"I never went to any disco, I didn't know anything about dance. Whatever jumping or dancing I did in films, is because of my Ganapati and Govinda (Lord Krishna)," Jeetendra said here Monday during Ganesh aarti at his residence.

The festival started Monday.

The 71-year-old also recalled his childhood days when he would run from one house to another to grab prasad (food offerings to the god).

"We kids used to roam around the entire building to collect money for the Ganapati festival. Every house had it's own Ganapati also, besides the common one of the building, and my charm was to check the prasad a house had kept," he said.

"If it was sugar, then we would skip that house. We would stay at houses that had some sweets. We reached only during the end of the aarti and had the prasad quickly and went away," he added.

Born into a Punjabi family, Jeetendra grew up in the Girgaum area of Mumbai and till date, he performs the first aarti of the building where he stayed in as a child.