Karan Johar’s cup of woes seems to be overflowing at the moment. With tension between India and Pakistan having escalated just before the release of Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, there is tremendous pressure on him to remove the scenes of Pakistani actor Fawad Khan from the movie.
We don’t really know the extent of Fawad’s role and it is said to be a small one but making a character disappear altogether must play havoc with the continuity of the script. Karan has so far not indicated that he will change the movie but it looks like the problem is not going to go away.
Movies are released in multiplexes and single screens. While collections from multiplexes are very profitable to a filmmaker, single screens dominate the small town and cities. An association of single screen theatre owners has now decided that they will not screen Ae Dil Hail Mushkil because of the presence of Fawad in it. That means a substantial loss of revenue for Karan and much of the country will not be able to see it. He is also not finding many in Bollywood to speak for him because the sentiment in the country makes any such stand seem anti-patriotic.
Meanwhile, Ajay Devgn whose movie Shivaay also releases on the same date, might be well capitalising on the issue. He has gone to town with interviews saying he wouldn’t work with Pakistani artistes at the moment because he feels that the country should come first. There had been a rather bitter squabble recently when Ajay accused Karan of paying off an actor called Kamaal R Khan, who has a large following in Twitter to badmouth Shivaay.
In fact, the episode has also had a personal cost for Karan. He has always had a great friendship with Ajay’s wife Kajol, who has featured in almost all his movies in one form or another. She was in fact the lead actress of the very first movie he directed, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. But apparently their friendship is now not what it used to be. This was revealed by none other than Ajay in an interview to a news agency. Ajay said that while he was not really friends with Karan even Kajol’s was not as warm as it used to be. Interestingly, he also said it had nothing to do with the clash but was related to some other personal issue. 

The jibe target 
Sonam has been taking subtle swipes at Deepika Padukone for some time now. She has in the past commented on Deepika having little fashion sense. Once Sonam also said that were she to take up a social cause she would never announce it on social media. This was also a dig at Deepika publicly talking about her depression in order to create awareness about the ailment.
And now what seems like a rather innocuous comment is also being construed by many as commenting on Deepika’s love life. In a podcast that Neha Dhupia was hosting, Sonam was asked about her relationship status. She replied to being single and then went on to add that she had never dated or had sex with her co-stars which was why her chemistry was so good with them.
Deepika, as it turns out, has had co-stars who were boyfriends or ex-boyfriends in her last two movies Bajirao Mastani and Tamasha. And not just that. When Neha asked Sonam who was a better actress, Deepika or Priyanka Chopra, unsurprisingly she chose Priyanka.

Call to back off
Being Amitabh Bachchan’s grandchildren is not very easy because of the interest that the media has in them. While children don’t get reported on so much, once they are into their teens they become an object of intense attention for the gossip mill and paparazzi.
One of the ways in which this snooping is done is through getting images that these star-children put up on social networking websites. Navya Naveli Nanda, daughter of Shweta Bachchan, has been especially targeted. A few months ago, images of the 18-year-old partying in a bikini went viral online.
What is never really known very well is how does such prying happen. Stars get used to it as part of their celebdom but their families are different. Shweta Bachchan gave a glimpse of how disturbed they were in a column she wrote in a newspaper. Titled A Mother’s Request she lambasted those who took the photos without permission off private social networking sites to, ‘post on their websites captioning them irresponsibly and disrespectfully, most of them stop short of objectifying and shaming her. This has been happening with my daughter since she was 13 years old!!’
She asked them to desist doing this by writing, ‘Perhaps if they understood that we, just like them, are human beings, trying to get about our everyday lives while making sure we give respect to the love and affection people show members of our family, couldn’t they in return give my daughter her private life back?’

Flop debut
It can be quite crushing for a movie to flop and for a debutant actor the distress is manifold. Harshvardhan Kapoor is just beginning to learn this. Mirzya, the Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra directed movie, has bombed at the box office.
Mehra traverses on the offbeat line but his movies — Rang De Basanti, Delhi-6, Bhaag Mikha Bhaag — have all had big stars and are squarely targeted at a popular audience. He is the kind of director that a star’s son would do his first movie with in order to signal that he is an actor with substance. But the gamble does not always work.
What has surprised everyone about Mirzya is the scale of the flop. The movie found it difficult to even reach the 10 crore mark in its first week. Usually, the reason why a star’s son is cast is so that the curiosity value pulls in an initial audience but even that seems to have not happened in this case.
But the advantage of coming from a film family is you get more than one chance to come back. Harshvardhan’s next is with Sriram Raghavan, who recently made Badlapur which was both commercially and critically acclaimed. That might set his career going.

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