Kangana Ranaut is on the warpath. For last two weeks, she has been appearing on the big news platforms and has spoken the story of her life, leaving out nothing. The Hrithik Roshan saga is often repeated and now she fearlessly takes his name instead of couching it in hints. She lambasts his whole family. But the man who is really bearing the brunt of her new avatar is Aditya Pancholi, who first ‘mentored’ her when she came to Mumbai as an aspiring model. They had a relationship even though he was married and much older. But the exact nature of the abuse she was subjected to has only been revealed now. In her interviews, Kangana makes it a point to emphasise how she was a year younger than his daughter. They had first got acquainted when she was in school in a hill station up north where he had been visiting. When she came to Mumbai for modelling, she had run into him again. She was staying in a hostel with friends and he then offered to move them to a decent apartment. And then he had slowly isolated her from everyone else until she was completely in his control. 
Kangna spoke about how she was stalked and abused. Once when he knocked on the door, to run away from him she had jumped out of the first floor and with bruised legs gone to a hotel. But he had once again tracked her and was there the next morning. Her tales sound believable because she speaks about third parties who helped her, like the director Anurag Basu who helped hide her once. She said that she even tried to take the help of Pancholi’s wife who in fact told her that she was relieved because Pancholi no longer came home. The terror only stopped after Kangana had filed a police complaint. And she therefore exhorted all young women to be careful of people who tried to control them and to go to the police. 
Pancholi, on the other hand, has been saying that Kangana is making up all these stories. He alleges that she is not in her senses and that he is going to sue her.  One of the things that bother people about Kangana’s new phase of truth telling is that it is happening just before the release of her movie Simran, leading to allegations of it being a publicity stunt.

Change in story

The thing with superstars in Bollywood is that directors usually have to modify their ambitions if they have to work with them. Take the case of Sanjay Leela Bhansali who has for long wanted to make a biopic on the romance between the poets Sahir Ludhianvi and Amrita Pritam. And some time back we heard reports that he was going to get Shah Rukh Khan to play Sahir. Priyanka Chopra was reportedly the choice for Pritam but then she was no longer in the scene. Aishwarya Rai, old Bhansali favorite, was the other name that cropped up. The movie was to be titled Gustakhiyan. There were also increasing reports of Bhansali and Shah Rukh meetings which led to speculation that project was moving ahead. However, there has been a curious development. Apparently, the two are still going to work together but the movie is not going to be Gustakhiyan. They are now looking at other stories and are said to have a couple of choices in hand. This change in plans most probably will have something to do with Shah Rukh, given his desperation for a big hit. He might have felt that a romance between two poets might not be the story that gets him a blockbuster.  And because he is Shah Rukh, he gets to choose.    

Driving irony 

Salman Khan managed to escape going to prison by the skin of his teeth after a high court reversed a lower court verdict. The crime that he was accused of was driving over pavement dwellers while being drunk. And while the judiciary might have pronounced him innocent (for the moment at least since the government has gone in appeal in the Supreme Court) many still think that he got off because he had the best lawyers in the country. Since many years now Salman has astutely repositioned his image from bad boy to responsible citizen. But recently there was a slight glitch in the public relations. 
Turns out that Salman had inaugurated, of all the things, a driving school in Dubai. Anything else no one would have noticed but that he should be part of something connected to teaching of driving led to a number of jokes on Twitter. Public memory is not short when it comes to superstars. Meanwhile he is also said to be playing a character with shades of grey for probably the first time in his career in Race 3. So far he has only done movies in which he is an out and out hero, with all the great qualities that heroes must possess. However in the Race franchise everyone ends up betraying each other and it will be interesting to see how much Salman has been willing to push his own limits.

Tepid return

Bobby Deol finally gets back on the big screen after many years. There was time when he was the hot young star on the horizon with the looks to go with it. And unusually for someone who comes from Dharmendra’s family, he could even dance. He was never going to be superstar material because of his limited acting abilities, but one could have expected then that he could hang on at the second tier. As it turned out, even that didn’t happen. Soon the offers started drying up and he was out of work. To understand his descent, turn to 2001 when he acted in a movie called Ajnabee. The other main star in the movie was Akshay Kumar and Bobby was the main hero with Akshay assaying the negative character. In 2017, Bobby is nowhere around while Akshay is firmly at the top. The movie that Bobby is now appearing in is called Poster Boys. As with all his last few movies, accompanying him is his brother Sunny. But the movie, if initial reports are to go by, has done nothing at the box office with dismal audience turnout. Bobby might have to just go back to struggling again now. 

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