It was once upon a time the most talked about male-bonding in Bollywood. Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt were the thickest of friends, who couldn’t stop praising each other.
Its beginning went right back to the superhit movie Saajan, in which both had acted together. The year it released was 1991 and Salman had just come into the industry. Sanjay was already a big star who was right at the top of the league, having stabilised himself following drug addiction issues in his youth.
He would go on to have much bigger problems but at the time he was in an enviable place. Salman looked up to Sanjay and even the later fixation with pumping iron and body building is said to have been because of that influence. The friendship endured for a long time.
When Salman Khan began to host the reality show Bigg Boss, in episodes when he couldn’t make it because of movie commitments, it was Sanjay who was the temporary stand-in. Even when Sanjay was in jail serving his prison sentence for an arms case, Salman was resolutely behind him.
He even offered his publicist for an image makeover after Sanjay’s release. But that strangely is speculated to be a reason for why they just don’t seem to be friends now. Apparently, Sanjay didn’t get any movie offers and later came to know that the publicist had quoted a fee that producers thought was too high. And so he sacked the publicist annoying Salman, goes this version of the rumour.
The other reason is said to be because Ranbir Kapoor was chosen to play Sanjay’s character in the biopic being made on him by Rajkumar Hirani. Ranbir and Salman share something common in having Katrina Kaif as their girlfriend once. But while Salman still enjoys a good friendship with her, Ranbir is not on talking terms. Salman didn’t like the idea of Ranbir being in the movie but apparently Sanjay wouldn’t rethink on it.
Sanjay’s camp says there is no break in the friendship despite rumours that they avoid each other at events. An annual Iftar party by a politician in which once Salman and Shah Rukh Khan had finally kissed goodbye to their enmity was going to be a venue for a similar patch up with Sanjay but the latter had not turned up there. Meanwhile, one report also said that Sanjay’s wife Maanyata is trying to get the friendship going again.
The return
After four long years, Akshaye Khanna will once again be seen in a Bollywood movie. But it won’t be as a hero. He plays a negative role in the soon to be released Dishoom, which stars Varun Dhawan and John Abraham.
Not that Akshaye has not played a villain before. Both Hamraaz and Race, in which he had played the antagonist, had been huge hits but at the time he was also playing hero roles. Now, after years in the wilderness it was probably not a choice he had. His last movie in 2012 had been a flop and before that he had been relegated to side roles in movies like Tees Maar Khan, which too had not done any better in the box office.
What was strange about Akshaye was how completely he had disappeared. In fact, he has always been a mysterious figure. Intensely private, his unmarried status well into the early 40s is always being commented upon. Then there were the rumours sometime in 2008 that he had been into rehab for alcoholism. Akshaye has always denied that there was any truth to this. But even now he gets asked about them by the media. He is known to be a good actor and so hopefully Bollywood will see more of him.
A date problem
Woe is the fate of Raees, that Shah Rukh Khan movie which has many high expectations tied to it after the tepid reception to his last endeavour, Fan. The problem, strange as it might be for someone as powerful as Shah Rukh, is he just can’t seem to find a safe date for it.
First the movie was going to clash with Salman Khan’s Sultan and Shah Rukh postponed the date to end of January next year to coincide with the Republic Day holiday week. This was because of Shah Rukh’s belief that there were just not enough movie screens in the country to host the movies of two big stars. It seems to have been a wise decision, in retrospect, considering the stupendous success of Sultan.
But he now has to face another problem. Because the week that Raees is now slated to release, a Hrithik Roshan film, Kaabil, is also coming out. So Shah Rukh once again has to deal with the problem of screens being shared. He recently met Rakesh Roshan, Hrithik’s father and the producer of the movie, to see if some solution could be arrived at. After he came back he tweeted, ‘Met friend/mentor/family after many a days.Mr. R.Roshan reminded me…it’s not important to do 2 much, it’s important to get 1 right. Thx sir.’
It was thought that he had been able to convince Roshan. But almost immediately there was clarification from Roshan that his movie would come out on schedule. The questions now is therefore what was that Shah Rukh tweet about then?
Sudden remake
Kabali released last week to the kind of publicity that you can only expect from a Rajnikanth movie. Though made in Tamil, it has been released in Hindi too in a dubbed version. If not for anything else, curiosity led many to take to the theatres but the Hindi audience was never going to be as big as his Tamil one.
But what is surprising is that even as the movie hit the screens, there was a rumour floating around that a Hindi remake of it was also going to be made. The man who would play Rajnikanth’s character was said to be Amitabh Bachchan. The two are great friends but for a movie’s remake to be decided upon as soon as it is released is just too sudden. Probably there is nothing concrete to the news.
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FRIENDS NO MORE? Rumours say Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt have fallen out of favour with each other.
