Bipasha Basu and John Abraham in happier times. The ex-lovers go to great lengths to avoid being seen in public together these days.
There was time when they were the most talked about couple in Bollywood. John Abraham and Bipasha Basu made more heads turn than anyone else when they stepped into a party.
He had been India’s biggest male supermodel taking his first steps into stardom and she was already the sexy sultry face of Bollywood. As against the general rule of never declaring a relationship, they didn’t keep their affair a secret.
In fact, it was the other way round. They announced that they were together and spoke of their lives without trepidation. Once when they had both entered a nightclub around midnight, a man had suddenly accosted Bipasha, groped her and ran. John chased and caught up with the molester. He then beat him up.
Remembering that incident makes what happened recently a little amusing. After their split which was primarily due to John unwilling to make a long-term commitment, the couple had been avoiding each other. The premiere show of Race 2, where John plays the negative character, had seen a bevy of stars.
John was predictably there since he could not miss his own film’s premiere. He was talking to the media at the entrance of the venue, when to everyone’s surprise he suddenly hurried to the elevator and disappeared. Later, it became known that he had learnt that Bipasha was just about to arrive and so had taken pre-emptive action against an uncomfortable encounter. As against the days when he ran to protect Bipasha, he was now running away from her.
Controversially, déjà vu
No matter how hard he tries Amitabh Bachchan just can’t keep out of controversy. Or being the object of someone’s else machination. It goes all the way back to the early 1980s when he tried his hands at politics at the bidding of his childhood friend, the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. He got dragged into a corruption allegation over the purchase of guns by the Indian army where the main target was Rajiv.
Amitabh responded by quitting politics but it left him estranged from the Gandhi family. You would have thought that would be a lesson learnt. But from the last decade or so, he was seen to be increasingly cosy with the Uttar Pradesh politician Mulayam Singh, whose aide Amar Singh was practically always stuck to Amitabh. And that then led to a whole slew of allegations on him over land grab by those opposed to Mulayam.
Last week he again made news for the wrong reasons. One was when a court in Uttar Pradesh dismissed a completely baseless allegation against him that he had said something communally offensive on his chat show Kaun Banega Crorepati.
But the more serious issue was an activist saying that Amitabh had invested almost $2mn in a firm which had been flouting environmental laws. While the Bachchans did not respond, the company in which he had allegedly invested, while denying any wrongdoing, said that the star had only bought a flat from them.
It’s the danger of being famous and having too many friends. Once you have become a soft target then everyone looks for easy publicity.
Fact but fiction
There is an entire army of people who are now trying to make a name by creating a controversy over Bollywood films. For example, before Son of Sardaar was released, a Sikh group said it offended their religion. Ajay Devgn met them and sorted it out even though it was an obvious publicity stunt.
Filmmakers are on tenterhooks now about not offending anybody. Sanjay Gupta, who is making a sequel to the hit film Shootout At Lokhandwala, is one of those staying a step ahead of a crisis. The film is about a gangster named Manya Surve and its script is adapted from a non-fiction book called Dongri to Dubai.
Some of the characters in the movie are other gangsters like Dawood Ibrahim. Recently the policeman who killed Surve said that he had not been such a big gangster after all and that the other characters were misrepresented. He warned about legal trouble.
Gupta immediately decided that this was not an issue worth bickering over and has changed the names of all the real life characters in the movie to fictitious ones. Only Manya Surve stayed as Manya Surve. Considering the climate of rabble-rousing, this seems a wise thing to do.
Angry superhero
It was an innocuous picture in the inside pages of a tabloid but it was enough to get Hrithik Roshan out of hibernation in Twitter. The photo had a Hrithik lookalike in the superhero costume of his movie Krrish. He was at a height looking down and the caption mentioned that it was not Hrithik but a body double substituting for him.
The star himself was in his trailer nearby, comfortably ensconced, said the caption suggesting that all of Hrithik’s stunts in the superhero movie were done like this.
Hrithik immediately got onto Twitter and started by apologising for his absence. The last time he had tweeted was 18 days ago.
He said the newspaper was trying to deliberately ‘upset’ him and the man they showed in the photo was not a body double but a stand-in, someone who is there instead of the actor while the ‘crew do lighting, fix d correct lens rehearse d camera move, rehearse d stunt, fix appropriate precautions etc.’ He went to add, ‘I do use body doubles I regard them wth great respect n have used thm 4 specific situations in all my films EXCEPT Krrish. Simple cause krrish is all about body language — my body language. There, clarified. Out of my system. God bless u newspaper and lensman, I forgive u. Love 2 u all.’
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