Looks like Rishi Kapoor is once again in trouble for shooting his mouth off. It is an affliction he picked up after he got onto Twitter. With unfailing regularity he sets off some controversy or the other.
Some time back he had managed to irk the rightwing Hindus of the country when, after a beef ban in Maharashtra, he railed against it saying that he was a beef eater but that didn’t mean he didn’t respect the religion. He had gotten a lot of abuses from trolls, most of whom are supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
This time he has managed to anger supporters of the opposition Congress party. He suddenly went on a Tweet overdrive against public institutions being named after the Gandhi family, who are the leaders of the Congress.
Rishi’s tweets included: ‘Change Gandhi family assets named by Congress. Bandra/Worli Sea Link to Lata Mangeshkar or JRD Tata link road. Baap ka maal samjh rakha tha?’, ‘If roads in Delhi can be changed why not Congress assets/property ke naam? Was in Chandigarh wahan bhi Rajeev Gandhi assets? Socho? Why?’, ‘We must name important assets of the country who have contributed to society. Har cheez Gandhi ke naam? I don’t agree. Sochna log!’
And so on. This immediately made him the target of Congress trolls who began to abuse him online. Even offline, there were some amusing retaliations. In the city of Allahabad, Congress workers named a public toilet after him. But Rishi refused to be cowed down. In fact, when Amitabh Bachchan became targeted by Congress workers for an entirely different issue, Rishi came out in his support.
With the present government completing two years in power, Bachchan had been roped in to participate in an event to mark the occasion. He was to host one segment in it. But the Congress had said that because Bachchan’s name figures in a list of people holding offshore accounts, which could indicate tax evasion, he shouldn’t have been invited. Bachchan and the Gandhis were once thick friends but later fell out when he gave up active politics in the 1980s. Rishi decided to needle the Congress some more on this in a media interview saying that the Congress was unfairly targeting Bachchan and asked whether the Gandhis were jealous because Bachchan was ‘doing something for the other government?’
Some are now speculating whether Rishi might want to get into politics but he says that all he wants to do is voice an opinion.
Bollywood return
Ram Gopal Varma is back in Bollywood again with a new release, Veerappan. And for a change, he is not getting terrible reviews. Which is not to say that he is getting good reviews but that a few reviewers are saying that there are flashes of Varma of the past means some progress at least.
The movie is based on the life of the famous dacoit Veerappan, which Varma says he spent a lot of time researching. While it will be too optimistic to expect that Varma will make movies like Satya and Shiva again, that he has made a movie that is lucid is welcome.
He had not been finding many takers among Bollywood A-list stars to act in his Hindi movies for a while. But if rumours are to be believed then Varma might be directing Amitabh Bachchan again in Sarkar 3, the third of the series. The first two movies had done reasonably well. There is some hope for him in Hindi movies after all.
The grudge
Salman Khan has something of a paradoxical personality. At one level he is generous and many say is ruled by the heart. He will go out of the way to help people out. Like when Govinda’s fortunes had dropped and there were no movies coming his way, it was Salman who gave his career a second lease of life. Likewise, he has launched a number of sons and daughters of his friends in Bollywood.
On the other hand Salman can also be quite unforgiving against anyone who he thinks has slighted him. After Vivek Oberoi called a press conference and spoke of Salman making drunken calls to him throughout the night over Aishwarya Rai, Salman has continued to act as if Vivek does not exist even though it has been more than a decade since the incident.
Vivek has tried to apologise but to no effect. Another man who has bore the brunt of Salman’s anger now is the singer Arijit Singh who found a song of his in the soon to released Salman starrer Sultan dropped without any explanation. Arijit then began an embarrassing display of public apologies to Salman.
Turns out a few years ago, he had gone to an award function which Salman and Riteish Deshmukh were hosting. Arijit, tired after a long day at work, had dozed off when his name was called to receive the award. When he finally walked up, he joked to Salman that he had slept because they had put him to sleep. Salman had apparently taken it as an insult and no amount of apologies from Arijit seems to have changed his mind. Though those from Salman’s camp are saying that it was the producers who dropped the song and he had nothing to do with it.
Disorder industry
Sometime back Deepika Padukone spoke about her depression and got a lot of admirers for her courage to open up about such a personal issue. And now another actress has revealed how much being in Bollywood can lead to low self-esteem culminating in disorders.
Richa Chadda, whose movie Sarabjit has just hit the screens, gave a TEDx talk in which spoke of her journey and how much she changed because of the way people judged her looks in the film industry.
She talked about how she had thought herself beautiful all her life until she reached Bollywood where everyone was telling her to change — from the way she looked to how much she should weigh to even her expressions. She then developed bulimia. She said that eating disorders are the best-kept secret among actors.
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CONTROVERSIAL: After Bharatiya Janata Party, Rishi Kapoor seems to have miffed Congress and its supporters.
