Shah Rukh Khan should write a book on How to Lose Friends. All his old groupies from the industry from the time he was a struggler got burnt sooner or later at the altar of his superstardom. But, ironically, he is not always to blame for it.
There was Farah Khan’s alienation after Shah Rukh didn’t ‘approve’ of her marriage with Sirish Kunder.
There were rumours of an estrangement with Karan Johar after he had a run in with Priyanka Chopra following Shah Rukh’s alleged affair with her. And now one his oldest friends, Juhi Chawla, has said that they are no longer very close.
The trouble comes from the entertainment company, Red Chillies, that they own jointly. Since the beginning, the CEO of the company had been Juhi’s brother, Bobby Chawla. But in 2010, he had had a stroke and has been in a coma ever since.
It is impossible to not give some credit for Shah Rukh’s decency that Bobby continued to remain CEO for three years despite his situation.
Recently, however, Red Chillies made the announcement that he was being replaced by Venky Mysore, the CEO of the cricket team, Kolkata Knight Riders, that is also owned by Shah Rukh and Juhi. This is a sound business decision since there needs to be someone at the helm to think about the company’s growth. But Juhi’s not too happy about it.
In interviews, she has been saying that she was not informed about the change by Shah Rukh. Instead it was only after Venky called to tell her the news, that she found out. And she hints that their friendship is not what it used to be.
Juhi was known to be very close to her brother and him being in a coma is clearly a tragedy that she is still adjusting to. While Shah Rukh is probably correct in having a new CEO, he could perhaps have done it a more considerate fashion.
A question of character
There are a million teenage girls who land up in Mumbai with aspirations to be a film star but not even a handful make it. Kangana Ranaut, for a long time, latched on to Aditya Pancholi, a married fading actor. It got her a foothold into the industry and a few roles followed. She capitalised on them and soon her career was blossoming.
She dropped Pancholi thereafter. Kangana is a survivor who knows what cards to play. It was therefore inexplicable that in a movie called Rascals, a home production of Sanjay Dutt, she managed to rub both Dutt and the other leading star in the movie, Ajay Devgn, in the wrong manner. There were rumours about an affair with Devgn which led to him promoting her for some time. And then, it was said, the affair ended and there was bad blood all around with Kangana being blacklisted.
So she really has to make up her standing in the industry with whatever she has. It is somewhat surprising that she has once again got into a tiff with Sanjay Gupta, the director of her latest film, Shootout at Wadala. He apparently wanted her to perform in a hot dance number in the film but she refused. She didn’t think it was in tune with the character she played of a suffering widow. At this rate, she will soon run out of movies to work in.
Sunny days
Sunny Leone, the porn star, is fast becoming the reigning sex symbol of Bollywood. The first to capitalise on her fame was Mahesh Bhatt, who gave her a break after she took part in the reality show Big Boss. The film, like all the Bhatt films which capitalise on sensuality, was a decent hit. Sunny is now also in the just-released Shootout At Wadala in an item number.
What is surprising is that even though it is a bit role, she is quite prominent in all the film’s promotional materials. The strangest was her being in a panel discussion of a prominent national news channel where she shared the limelight with Anil Kapoor, Tusshar Kapoor and John Abraham, the stars of the movie. They were all in one side of a debate about pornography.
Recently there has been national outrage in India about the rape of a child in Delhi. The rapists were said to be viewing porn before the crime. The show was discussing whether pornography led to rape. The stars of Shootout at Wadala were arguing against it while on the opposite side there were activists arguing that there was a connection. The interesting thing was that the idea for the whole show seemed to have been tailored around the fact that Sunny was a porn star.
Otherwise there was no reason why the actors should have been involved in a discussion like this. Sunny, of course, has a while to go before she can become a full-fledged actress in Bollywood mainly because of the language problem. But there is no doubt that she has carved her own space.
Copy issue
Bombay Talkies is said to be an avant garde project, a series of short films to mark 100 years of Bollywood. Karan Johar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee and Zoya Akhtar are the directors whose works are going to be featured in it. Zoya’s film has, however, run into a spot of bother.
The plot revolves around a boy obsessed with Katrina Kaif who often appears as a fairy to him at night. After seeing the promos, a filmmaker called Sudipto Chattopadhyay was struck by how similar it was to his film, Pankh, in which Bipasha Basu comes as a fairy to a boy.
Pankh is about sexual identity because the boy likes to dress in a girl’s clothes. In Zoya’s film, the boy dresses like Katrina. Chattopadhyay says that on making further enquiries he was convinced that his plot had been lifted. He is threatening legal action. Zoya denies any plagiarism.
Send your feedback to
* Shah Rukh Khan, Juhi Chawla: Not friends forever?
* Kangana Ranaut: Stretching it too far.
* Bombay Talkies: Plagiarism trouble.
