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 Like a true professional Amitabh Bachchan is known to be keeping track of good directors. He even sends them feelers or mentions them in his interviews and thus getting them to approach him with roles specially written for him.
This is what he did when he learned that the director of Aamir Khan’s super hit Sarfarosh John Mathew Matthan was planning Shikhar. In stead of making some changes in his script to suit Bachchan’s age, as any other director would have done, the one hit maker signed Ajay Devgan and Shahid Kapoor.
Now that the film has proved to be a damp squib, Bachchan may be quietly laughing!
While on Big B, marketing about him may continue to create the image of a towering actor, but the truth is something else.
He doesn’t have box office pull. Why else did Ek Ajnabi didn’t even get an initial even when he was very much in news with his illness? We think that what media thinks of him – thanks to his marketing technique – is very different from what the viewers think of him.
Ash and Sush war continues
 The war between Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen refuses to end!
It has begun when one became Miss World and the other Miss Universe and both were compared. Sush was considered warm and impulsive, Ash was considered cold and calculative. Ash is more successful than Sush in the film market – what with Hollywood films and a price tag of Rs 3 crore in India – but Sush is not behind either. She has worked with the best and has moved in the best circles (ahem!) getting herself huge diamond rings and deciding to play the role of lifetime – Jhansi Ki Raani. “I always wanted to play Jhansi Ki Raani,” she has said.
Now, we see that two films are in the air; one with Sush and the other with Ash.
Ketan Mehta has announced Jhansi Ki Rani as his second film after Mangal Pandey (the third is on Bahadur Shah Zafar). And there are stories that he has approached Aishwarya Rai to play the lead. Sushmita Sen has been approached by Dr Chandraprakash Diwedi to play Jhansi Ke Rani!
So, will it be a repeat of Bhagat Singh syndrome? Much earlier, a similar thing happened when three films were made on the love story of Heer Ranjha.
Personally, I do not think that there will be two films this time. Diwedi has also announced Prithviraj-Sanjukta and here too, Rajkumar Santoshi has announced Prithviraj-Sanjukta.
The common factor in the story, Diwedi is making a laughing stock of himself but that is beside the point.
Two Marriages Gone Sour: Aamir’s and Saif’s
Aamir Khan is getting married and people are talking about who has and hasn’t been invited and what is going to be the menu and who is going to wear what in Panchgani. What has gone unnoticed is the increasing unpopularity of Khan. Whether it is because he dumped his first wife Reena – shocking the Bollywood as he was supposed to be happily married for 17 years – unceremoniously or gave legal notices to his father Tahir Hussain when the later got married again, but the signs are on the wall.
His much touted Mangal Panday: The Rising bombed and there doesn’t seem much interest in his next Rang De Basanti.
His marriage may get a lot of coverage but with my ear to the ground I know that his fans feel betrayed! Aamir (and SRK) have a family man kind of goody goody image. And Reena didn’t seem to have done anything wrong.
The only excuse Aamir can have for his second marriage is the success of Lagaan.
The story is identical when we take a look at Saif Khan and Amrita Singh. Saif unchained himself after getting his first solo success: Hum Tum. However, it didn’t harm his image. First, because he had married a woman much older to him – Amrita Singh – and secondly, she emerged as having tyrannically ruled over him; even shaming him for not making a success of his career.
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