Jamie Alter, the man who knew Tom Alter the best, is now keeping the actor's memory alive online

Tom with Jamie

Tom Alter lived a building away from our childhood home. As a child growing up in the '90s in Mumbai Central, we would look out for the white man with a kind smile who spoke chaste Hindi.

Many will remember him as the brilliant actor in Zabaan Sambhalke and Ram Teri Ganga Maili, among others. For us, it hits a little closer home when we first spot his son Jamie Alter on social media, all these years later, reminiscing about the much-loved actor.

Jamie Alter

In fact, when we get on the phone with Jamie, we tell him we'd often see him as a young child, walking in the neighbourhood with his dad. "Oh wow!" he exclaims, "It's a small world!" Jamie, who has been a sports journalist for over 21 years, had largely kept his Instagram (@jamie.alter) and YouTube (@CricketWithJamie) geared towards cricket. "Actually I started posting cricket content on Instagram almost daily two years ago. Before that I was not so active. Then last August I started adding some non-cricket content," he says. What changed? "I think it was a way for me to keep his memory alive. I just started posting on Instagram, and that brought in a completely new audience to my account. I will forever be grateful for the love they have shown my dad," he adds.

Tom with wife Carol and Jamie

Born in 1981, Jamie remembers was in his pre-pubescent time when the 90s arrived. "When the decade turned over, I was nine going on 10. The '90s were an awesome decade for me. I had just hit teenage, and it was an era of pop culture awakening and self-discovery," he says. The best part? His access to Bollywood stars came at a time when they were still approachable. "My father was a famous actor, so a lot of my memories are from TV and film sets. An on-set memory that tickled his followers was from Hum Kisise Kum Nahin (1977), when actor Amjad Khan met his father for the first time. "He hugged him, put his hand in my father's jacket and began looking for a tape recorder, convinced that my dad could not be the one speaking such good Hindi," Jamie recalls.

The journalist "is very late" to the Instagram game, he says, having made his account in 2015 ahead of the 2015 ODI World Cup. Until two years ago, he would mostly post cricket-specific videos daily, he says.

"What I am doing now, with [content on] Bollywood nostalgia/memories with my father, is an offshoot of spending a lot more time on Instagram over the past two years," he adds.

He still fields the stray misconceptions about his father. "Some think my dad was left behind from the British Raj," he chuckles. "Some assume we are Anglo Indians, which I find baffling," adds the American-origin writer. His followers can't get enough of the Tom Alter nostalgia. "Sometimes, I'll be doing a recap of an IPL match. And there'll be one comment saying, ‘Can you please talk more about your father?'" he laughs.

Tom Alter in a still from Kranti (1981)

He doesn't mind it at all, he says, "To be honest it's a way to grieve my father. What an honour it is that lakhs of people help me remember him and discover him as a person in different ways," he says.

To be honest, the honour is ours…