Kirdaar’ was a Hindi television series which was brain work of eminent filmmaker Gulzar. In fact, he was more obsessed to making short films. He had sometimes felt that short film was a perfect movie, and it is the purest form of cinema. Hence, when he made his journey to television, he made some special short films which were telecast as series in Doordarshan. One of them he made was ‘Kirdaar’, a series of short films based on stories by different authors in different languages.
He also made some prominent actors like Om Puri, Nadira and singer Bhupendra to act in the series. It was when Doordarshan evaluated its new sponsorship scheme; Gulzar made the serial which had stories by Urdu, Bengali, and Hindi literature. For instance, Gulzar had particularly chosen Ahmed Nadeem Qasim, an author who is famous from Pakistan, Samaresh Basu, a famous writer in Bengali and Malti Joshi from Hindi. Actress Nadira made her debut in television with this serial of Gulzar.
Even Dimple Kapadia was selected to do one role in the series. Irrfan Khan was seen in one episode. The show was telecast In 1993-1995. One of the episodes was 'Man Dhuaan Dhuaan' which was written by Gulzar based on Malti Joshi's story. The episodes had an impressive cast of Om Puri, Neena Gupta, Reema Lagoo and Bhiupnedra. Actress Neena Gupta played the role of Sumithra and Om Puri was Neena Gupta's brother, and Reema was Neena’s bhabhi.
Another episode ‘Mukhbi’ was based on Pakistan poet Ahmed Nadeem Qasim’s story. This episode had Om Puri, Pavan Malhotra, Sameer Khakhar and Bhupendra in the lead role. Another short film was titled in the episode as ‘Rehman Ke Joote’ based on Rajinder Singh Bedi's story which was again written by Gulzar. This episode had Om Puri, Surekha Sikri, Amrik Gill and Bhupendra in a lead role. The adaptation of one such short film was titled ‘Bel Nimbu’, based on a story of Samaresh Basu and it had Om Puri, Bhupendra, Ritu and S.M. Zaheer in the main cast.
It may be noted that Gulzar had made two films based on Samaresh Basu’s novel, and they were ‘Namkeen’ and ‘Kitaab’ which were his feature films released in theaters