LEGAL TROUBLE: Shah Rukh Khan is nowhere near the kind of trouble Salman Khan is in, but it is still an irritant for him. Right: HIT: Deepika Padukone’s latest film Piku has been doing quite well at the box office.
It has not been too long since Salman Khan escaped by the skin of his teeth going to jail. And his legal woes were just about going out of the consciousness of the public. Then another Khan has hit the headlines.
Thankfully, Shah Rukh Khan is nowhere near that kind of trouble but it is still an irritant for him. The Enforcement Directorate has summoned Shah Rukh over financial transactions related to Kolkata Knight Riders, the club cricket team he owns.
The summon goes back a number of years when some shares of the team were sold to a financial entity and the charge is that they were undervalued. All this might be too complicated for any of his fans to follow but any investigation at such a time is bad publicity.
What Shah Rukh is being questioned for is really nowhere in the league of the kind of thing Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt were involved in. So he won’t really be worried. And he is not alone. Juhi Chawla, his partner in the team, is also summoned.
Meanwhile cricket has been the source of another heartburn for him. His team is actually doing quite well in the ongoing Indian Premier League. But they then had a game in Wankhede stadium in Mumbai. The man who wasn’t watching it from the stands there was Shah Rukh and that was because he is banned from there by the sports association that owns the grounds.
This was after an ugly fracas when he had gotten into a fight with officials after a security guard had stopped his daughter and her friends from entering the grounds following a victory by the team. Shah Rukh has refused to apologise for his behaviour that day and the association has stuck to its guns on punishing him, despite Shah Rukh’s influence. But positive news for the superstar came online when it became known that the total number of his twitter followers had crossed 13 million.
A hit...again
There is really no end to the Deepika Padukone wave. Everything that she touches turns to gold. It could be an out and out commercial masala entertainer like Happy New Year or it could be an English movie for a niche multiplex audience like Finding Fanny — the audience just laps it up.
And the latest crowing glory is Piku, a movie around a staid theme of the relationship between a father and a daughter with none of the elements that make up for traditional Bollywood fares.
Piku walked the line between commercial and art. While critics predictably lauded the movie, what surprised everyone was how well it did at the box office.
It has already shot up into hit territory overtaking many other movies like Detective Byomkesh Bakshi, NH10 and Dum Laga Ke Haisha. And Piku is also a movie made on a low budget.
Deepika, at this rate, is widening the gulf between her and the rest of the actress pack in Bollywood. In her personal life too, things seem to be going great with Ranveer Singh. Recently, the two of them were seen together at a coffee shop in a five-star hotel and accompanying them was her father.
When families get involved in a relationship, then you know that there is something serious brewing. There is also Ranbir Kapoor, her former boyfriend turned good friend. They are once again working together in a movie and Deepika recently said in an interview that the two shared a special equation that couldn’t be put into words.
Another star who is quite overjoyed with the success of Piku is Amitabh Bachchan, still going great guns with every passing year. He took to Twitter to say, ‘A day when you realise that it is work that pays, not the pay that works! Deluged by the reactions of media for PIKU .. thank you.’
Shark attack
Speaking of Ranveer Singh, he got into a rather bizarre controversy recently. It had to do with an advertisement for an innerwear brand that shows Ranveer walking around a beach wearing their singlet and doing all kinds of superhuman things.
One of them is him noticing a girl in danger from a shark at the sea and then backflipping into the waters, picking up the shark and clobbering and punching it away into the air.
How something like this can offend anyone is hard to see but the animal rights organisation, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), decided that this portrayed cruelty towards sharks.
PETA said it would be writing to Ranveer to protest against the advertisement. The company didn’t want any controversy and said that they would run a disclaimer that no animals were used during the shoot and that no sentiments were meant to be hurt. What is ironic is that the shark in the advertisement was actually just a rubber toy.
Not in memoriam
Anurag Kashyap is a hard man for the media to catch but when his movie is releasing he interacts with them to promote it. And so with Bombay Velvet hitting the screens, his interviews have been appearing quite frequently.
One of the questions put to him was on his divorce from Kalki Koechlin after six years of marriage. Kalki is also in the limelight now with a brilliant performance in Margarita With A Straw.
He answered that they had gone separate ways because of personal reasons but he still counts it as the biggest loss of his life. He said Kalki had been the best thing to have happened to him and the divorce had been a result of his shortcomings.
But it got a little amusing when Kalki, in a separate interview, was asked what she thought of Anurag saying all that. Her reply was that Anurag spoke of her as if she was dead! She added that she was alive and there for him whenever he needed her. And that they still talked to each other. Sounds like a good way to be even if you are separated.
Send your feedback to
[email protected]
