Movie promotions can be a tiring affair for actors. Getting out of their cosy homes and isolated movie sets, they have to mix with the world outside. Events, interviews, performances, publicity stunts…they are all par for the course.
Once in a while it can lead to complications and for Salman Khan it came calling embroiling him in politics.  He had gone to the state of Gujarat to promote his movie and was caught on camera participating in a festival along with the chief minister Narendra Modi. When the media asked him to speak, he praised Modi, who is a controversial figure with allegations of allowing communal riots to happen under his watch a decade ago.
As usual it became a nasty controversy and Salman, who is not the most diplomatic of persons, made it worse by later making political statements like Modi need not apologise for the Gujarat riots. This was probably because Salman gets angry when pushed into a corner.
Later, he did a series of television interviews to mitigate the damage. He didn’t accept that he had done anything wrong but made the case that as an actor, it was his responsibility to promote the movie and that was all that he had been doing.
He said that he had campaigned for politicians before, but it was all based on his personal relationships with them. Otherwise, he was not for any particular party. By and large, such blunt talking does seem to have worked in his favour in recent times.
Till about a few years ago, Salman’s strategy had been to just ignore the media if his name got dragged into any controversy. But now he actively courts them to put his point of view across. This is especially true when it comes to his charity organisation Being Human. Meanwhile, all the recent controversies are also good for his just released movie Jai Ho because any publicity helps.


Sonam to essay Rekha
in Khoobsurat remake


Rekha, who is rarely heard of nowadays, suddenly made it to the news recently. The first time was when Amitabh Bachchan greeted her during a function. It was quite a sensational moment given that for decades they had not acknowledged each other in public after their alleged affair became public.
The second instance of Rekha’s name coming in the news was related to the remaking of Khoobsurat, which is perhaps her finest piece of acting in a commercial film. In the remake, Sonam is going to essay her role. And, in interviews, Sonam said that she has decided not to use the name of Anju, which Rekha’s character was called in the original movie. Instead she would be called Mili in the remake.  This was because Sonam wanted to remodel the character in her mould in a new milieu. Given her acting abilities, we will have to be real optimists to see her bettering Rekha’s performance.  


The comeback puzzle

The mystery of Aishwarya Rai’s return to the big screen seems to be never-ending. It has been some years since she left work to become a mother. She has since returned to act in some commercials and her public appearances are a lot more frequent now.
But when is she going to return to Bollywood is a question many have been asking for some time now. There has been news floating around that the project will be one in which her husband Abhishek Bachchan will act opposite her. But these rumours arise and disappear with intermittent regularity.
Recently it happened again and this time it had Mani Ratnam’s name, too. Ratnam has had a close relationship with the Bachchans. He was the one who gave Abhishek the only movie in which got really good critical acclaim. That was Yuva in which he played a gangster fated to doom.
In 2007, he again cast Abhishek in Guru and the actress playing the lead role was Aishwarya. Soon after in that year, Abhishek and Aishwarya got married. Usually married couples don’t star together in Bollywood, but three years later, in 2010, Ratnam did a casting coup by signing on Abhishek and Aishwarya for Raavan, his modern reinterpretation of the Ramayana. This time neither did the movie get rave reviews nor did it do well commercially.
With a history of being together in Ratnam’s movies, it is only natural that rumours of Aishwarya’s comeback would be connected to the director. And so it was. A newspaper reported that such a movie was happening and Aishwarya and Abhishek would be in it.  We will have to wait and see if it is true.


Tiff and make up

Ranbir Kapoor is wont to say that he does not make his relationship public because it just creates unnecessary complications. But that has not stopped the media from peeping into his life. The paparazzi photos of him and Katrina Kaif together in a Spain beach created a storm recently in the gossip circuit. And now the latest is that they are having issues in their relationship. According to reports, which as usual quotes only unnamed sources, they were on the verge of a split recently. A number of reasons were given for it. One was that Katrina was not ready to get married because of her career and was keeping off the decision. The other was that Ranbir was not ready to get married and was not proposing to her.
Poor Kareena Kapoor, who came on Karan Johar’s chat show and made a few jokes about the couple, was also said to be one of the reasons Katrina got angry. And then there was the perpetual Deepika Padukone angle floated
about.
Matters apparently came to such a head that during the shooting of a movie in which they were acting together, Ranbir and Katrina refused to talk to each other. But now, it is being said that the tiff is over and the two are back to cosy terms.

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