Sau sunaar ki, ek lohar ki!
Leaving the 100 crores club behind, Akshay Kumar has become a Rs 2000 crores man and how! I remember the time when his secretary Bali (now no more) pleaded with me to interview him and I met him at Natraj studio. His film was being released and we spoke about his background. He had been a cook in a small hotel in Thailand and wasn’t hiding it. He was a new age hero at that time!
He didn’t consume alcohol – he is still a teetotaler – and had a healthy way of coping up with anger and insomnia.
“If I am angry at someone or something, I just go to gym and work on the punching bag,” he had told me. And sleeping on the sand of any beach, listening to the calming sound of sea waves was his way to combat insomnia. He had said, “I have recorded the sounds and play the cassette in my bedroom if I can’t sleep.”
To come to the rivalry between the Khans and Akshay Kumar, I recall the rivalry between Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar as well as between Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar. To use a politically incorrect expression, the hoi polloi or another equally politically incorrect description (courtesy: Shashi Tharoor) the cattle class (read: mango man) used to treat the rivalry as communal. At the peak of this war, Hindus would be happy to see if Raj Kapoor’s ‘Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai’ did better than ‘Ganga Jamuna’, which Dilip Kumar directed by proxy.
I am not in touch with this class but suspect that there still is that kind of rivalry between Akshay and Khans and even between Ajay Devgan and Khan. Of course, a pragmatic Ajay is friendly with Salman but my private focus is not on a secular Salman but on Shah Rukh ‘My Name is Khan’ Khan and Aamir Khan who once avoided posing with L K Advani and has glorified terrorism in ‘Fanna’.
Thanks to Salim and his first wife, a Hindu, Salman figures in the category of secular stars.
http://zeenews.india.com/entertainment/celebrity/forget-rs-100-crore-club-akshay-kumar-is-now-a-rs-2-000-crore-hero_128129.htm
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‘A celebrity is a person who works hard all of his life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.’ Ezra Pound said.
Personally, I think celebrities – especially film stars – wear shades to
(1) Draw attention (why else will they wear goggles even at a late night party?)
(2) To hide tired eyes and hammocks below their eyes
(3) When some manufacturer pays them to endorse a brand.
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