Randhir and Kareena Kapoor at the unveiling of a bronze statue of showman and patriarch Raj Kapoor at the Walk of the Stars promenade in Mumbai last year ... Daddy dearest
You have to give it to Amitabh Bachchan when it comes to social networking. There is no one — absolutely no one from the film industry — who does it with so much discipline as him. He is relentless in updating his thoughts and experiences daily.
He does this at length in his blog and in short snappy tweets on Twitter. It also acts as a publicity vehicle for his films even while shooting is underway. This is why Satyagraha, which he is working on at the moment, suddenly saw a burst of attention.
In his blog, Amitabh keeps giving daily roundups about the shooting and also uploads pictures. All that would be boring if not for him dipping into his memory and pulling off interesting anecdotes. And pull a really interesting one out is what he did recently. He uploaded a photo of Kareena Kapoor with him at the location and mentioned the role that she is playing in the film. He said he found it wondrous that she had grown up so fast.
He recounted an incident when she was child and had come for a film he had been shooting for along with her father Randhir Kapoor. The act involved him thrashing Randhir, and Kareena, who was too young to realise it, ran up to her father and clung to him to protect him against Amitabh. And this was how Amitabh won over her heart in his own words: ‘In tears and most worried, she was relentless and very disturbed. She soiled her pretty little feet in the sand and in order to settle her down I had asked for some water and washed her tiny feet clean, to make her realise that this act was not for real but an enactment. I think after the feet washing, her opinion seemed to have changed about me. I wasn’t that ‘evil’ after all!!’
End of the affair?
It was an innocuous item but is loaded with possibilities. A small gossip number doing the rounds is that Priyanka Chopra has decided to act in an Ekta Kapoor project. That much is fine. But the movie, it was reported, that she decided to forego because of this was Shah Rukh Khan’s home production Happy New Year.
And that puts many spins on to it. Remember that Shah Rukh and Priyanka were rumoured to be having an affair and matters had reached to such a point that his wife Gauri had ganged up with other star wives to ostracise Priyanka.
Even Karan Johar had made a tweet attack on Priyanka castigating her after a news report had come out where she had defended herself against such treatment. And then it was said that Shah Rukh stepped in and everything was all right again. Evidently not.
Her not doing the movie could mean either that she has had enough of Shah Rukh or he has had enough of her. In any case, the possibility is high that the affair, if ever there was one, is over. Priyanka incidentally is reinventing herself as an international English pop sensation. If her situation in Bollywood has become precarious then it’s probably an advisable thing to do.
26/11 pariah
The promise that Ram Gopal Varma made to not make a movie on the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks finally got broken with the release of the movie. Remember that after the attacks, he had gone on a tour of the terror sites with the then chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who’s also the father of the actor Ritesh Deshmukh.
At the time Varma had said he had happened to be there with Ritesh when they had learnt that the chief minister was going to see the damage done by the terrorists and both of them had tagged along. He said he would never think of exploiting such a horrific event to collect material for a possible film.
The furore had contributed to the resignation of the chief minister at the time. The movie’s out now but Varma is still feeling the fallout of that terror-tour. Before the release he wanted to preview the movie for policemen and politicians.
But strangely he found no one wanting to accept the invitation. Heading this list was the Home Minister RR Patil, who also had had to resign at the time, and certainly didn’t want to do anything to renew those memories. Some senior policemen made the odd demand that they would come for the screening but only if Varma was not present so that photos of them together would not appear in the media.
Varma meanwhile hastily pulled his name out of the whole business. He said that it was the lead actor Nana Patekar’s desire to hold the screening and he really had had no part in it.
Hyper on award night
One Indian actor who is ecstatic after the Oscar awards is Anupam Kher. And you can forgive yourself for thinking the connection is a little remote but that doesn’t matter.
Kher has a small role in the movie Silver Linings Playbook, for which actress Jennifer Lawrence won the Best Actress award. He was an invitee at the ceremony and was on Twitter overdrive about what a great experience it was.
He first congratulated Jennifer Lawrence for her award adding, ‘She is unassuming and AMAZING.:)’. He then congratulated the Life of Pi team and Ang Lee and slipped in that he was ‘Proud to have worked with him.:)’. This tweet was accompanied by a picture of Kher with Lee.
He then congratulated everyone who had won. He then tweeted about going to Elton John’s party. It was all a heady dose of name dropping and self-promotion but what the heck, it is not every day that a Bollywood actor is part of an Oscar-winning film.
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