DECCAN CRONICLE ARTICLE

Wah! What a week it has been. First toh, Sunday ko, Shah Rukh Khan did cartwheels of various varieties and then his wife dissed him in public. All this made us ponder the short lives of superstars and their sad-sad endings. The sort of nautanki Khan saab was doing, Chennai se Kolkata tak, you'd think it wasn't a cricket match that he was celebrating, but a box office face-off with the other Khans.

Hai! But I do hope that the IPL win brings khushiyan and shanti into the lives of all the residents of Mannat. Oh! Shanti se yaad aaya, there is way too much ashanti in the lives of my favourite serial couple. In Bade Achche Lagte Hain (Sony), Priya, along with Neha, Vikram and now Natasha, is trying to drive Niharikaji cuckoo by creating Amarnath Kapoor's aatma and letting it bhatko in the Kapoor mansion. Niharikaji's earlier husband, Dr Jayesh Karlekar, is also maroing sudden entries to her great distress.

But, you know, I don't care whether Niharikaji goes mad or whether she admits her guilt because Ekta Kapoor has already killed this story. Apparently, Ayesha, who is currently playing dirty bed games with bad boy Sid, will get dumped and Ram, to save her izzat, will make her his wife. Priya will become single mom of a fatty baby girl who will keep meeting Ram at pastry counters and other high-calorie venues till mummy hugs papa again.

Ektaaji has no loyalty towards her viewers, so I too have decided to dump her for this really filmy serial, Madhubala: Ek Ishq Ek Junoon on Colors. Everybody associated with this serial is saying no-no, but lagta hai that this love story is based on the romance between Dilip Kumar and Madhubala. I have seen a couple of episodes and it's clear to me that this show is a work of filmi fiction based on flimsy facts. For one, Madhubalaji's daddy was not a raving lunatic who dangled dai-maas from a rassi and killed wives. He was just a very conservative daddy who objected to the nikaah of Mohammed Yusuf Sarwar Khan and Mumtaz Jehan Begum Dehalvi because Madhubala was the only earning member of his family and losing her to Dilip saab meant end of aish-o-araam.

So the two most gorgeous actors on screen who were madly in love in real life could never unite. He married Saira Bano and then another and she married Kishore Kumar and a very sad love story was born. If you want to catch a glimpse of that story, you are better off watching Mughal-e-Azam than Madhubala.