dats big b, his daughter and abhi
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how cum i neva saw dis celb fan club section..
i am a big fan of bachachanss...
wans join in... 😳
hello yaar...We are soo happy to have a new member...Hope u have lots of fun here...yes we all Love the Bachchanz!!!😃
Cheers and love..Laks😊
Btw...Fan_of_Big_B...great to see u active here...we are really very happy that more n more members are getting active😊
Originally posted by: lucky_lakshmi
hello yaar...We are soo happy to have a new member...Hope u have lots of fun here...yes we all Love the Bachchanz!!!😃
Cheers and love..Laks😊
Btw...Fan_of_Big_B...great to see u active here...we are really very happy that more n more members are getting active😊
yes..we like more in this family!! It looks better than just me, monix, pachu, and laxs posting!!😆
By Joginder Tuteja, Bollywood Trade News Network |
![]() Amitabh Bachchan | ||||||
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• A peek at Nishabd, in pictures • Meet Amitabh's 19-year-old heroine | ||||||
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I got an opportunity to portray a difficult character. Some journalists have praised my performance. I got phone calls, messages and letters about my performance. I thank everyone and wish that in the future too, I will keep doing such roles.
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Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai were engaged on January 14, ending national speculation about their romance. Their wedding will be one of the biggest events this year. As they get ready for better times ahead, rediff.com brings you news, photographs and much more about Bollywood's dream couple. |
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Six steps to a shaadi
The Bachchans were due at the music launch of Guru -- and they detoured to Ash's home, to pick her up so they could all go together.
If there were increasing signs that Ash and Abhishek were an item, it did not in itself signify marriage -- after all, Abhishek had once been engaged to Karisma, and Ash had been seeing first Salman Khan, then Vivek Oberoi.
'Wedding' entered the media vocabulary November 28, when Aishwarya joined Abhishek and his parents on a visit to Varanasi's famous Kashi Vishwanath and Sankat Mochan temples. Eyewitnesses suggested that Aishwarya sat on the left side of Abhishek, as a wife would under Hindu rituals, and took part in the mangala aarti followed by the rudrabhishek puja, which is usually performed by married couples.Aishwarya, traditionaly clad in a white salwar-kameez with printed dupatta and a pashmina shawl, looked very much a part of the Bachchan family.
Abhishek Bachchan came with his father for the premiere of Baabul, December 7; Ash arrived later with her family.
The Big B was quick to receive Ash, when she arrived; from then on, Ash and Abhishek remained together through the evening.A hint of awkwardness materialised when former beau Salman Khan, who stars in Baabul, crossed paths with Aishwarya -- the first public meeting of the two after their much-publicised split.
Reader Tanuja Bhosale bumped into the pair last month, when Ash and her mother Vrinda Rai dropped Abhishek, who was on his way to Paris, off at the airport.
Not too long before that, Abhishek was shooting for Shaad Ali's film Jhoom Barabar Jhoom in London, and Ash decided to fly over and join him.Before she did, she went to the Bachchan residence for a long chat with Jaya Bachchan, and among other things asked if she wanted to send something for her son, who had been away from home for a long time.
January 5 -- Dabboo Ratnani's calendar launch
The unveiling of Dabboo's calendar marked the second time that Amitabh, Abhishek and Ash came together in a same car. A laughing Ash was seen seated on the backseat while Amitabh was seen driving the car with Abhishek seated beside him. Throughout the evening, the couple were inseparable. Abhishek saw to it that none of the media people came close to Ash.
Ash and Abhishek were last spotted together for Guru's premiere in New York. This was their last public appearnce before their engagement on January 14.
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'A very little bit of Amitabh goes a long way'
In the picture: Amitabh in Don. Inset: Jessica Hines
And now you're writing books about big-name movie stars. Do you miss the clowning?
Well, basically, I carried the principles of Clowning with me -- they're very good ones to live your life by. Clown is religion. Basically, a lot of people spend their lives trying not to be laughed at. And actually, you can find strength through humour. Things that we often shy away from, are things we can learn from and be strengthened by. Clowning is brutal, painful. And what kind of Clowning were you good at? We did theatrical clowning. I didn't have an exploding car, which I always wanted, and I didn't have any floppy shoes. My costume was ripped up plastic underwear, polyester camisoles and French knickers. And you have to have your funny nose -- smallest mask in the world. Soon as you put that on, you become a clown. And your hat, which is very important, because that's your connection to the Clown gods. So how'd you go from funny noses to studying film? Or is that a smaller jump than one would imagine? When I came back, everyone I knew pretty much was graduating from university. I really was enjoying writing for Clown and theatre -- and a lot of torturous poetry at the time. Graduates from English Literature seemed paralysed by it all, Deconstructionism and yadda-yadda-yadda. Most of them lost the ability to write, so I thought that I wanted to have a way of learning stories, and different ways of seeing the world. So I started studying Comparative Religion, because I figured that'd be a lot of different perspectives, and structuring your life view. And one of my courses -- a free course, you can do whatever you want -- was Indian Cinema, which just happened to be on offer in the University. And then I bumped into Rachel Dwyer, who's gone on to write lots of books about Indian cinema, and became completely hooked. Why Indian cinema in particular? Had you seen any Bollywood films before that? Yeah, I'd seen one in India when I was 18 and really liked it, and watched a couple more when I came back. I remember watching Maine Pyaar Kiya on television in England and thinking, 'that poor pigeon!' Remember how the poor thing kept trying to get the note off, the one that was glued to its leg? Bollywood kinda meshed together my love for physical theatre, and the things that I liked about storytelling, and the things that I liked about spectacle and not being afraid of being larger than life. Truth can win, there are heroes. And the songs. God, yeah! The songs are great. What's not to love?In the picture: Amitabh, in a still from Deewar
So how good are you with them now? Can you follow them without subtitles?
I got to a point where I almost could. But my Hindi is pretty poor and I miss the lines. I'm not a linguist. I really tried, I took tons of courses, but I can understand better than I can speak. Because truth be told, the subtitles are pretty bad. Yeah, they're pretty bad but I can get enough from them so that I can get the Hindi, you know what I mean? You can differentiate enough to put it in context. If someone says something very Bombaiyya, there'll be just enough for me in the English translation to understand what he must have said, and how rich it is. But if there's a flood of language, it's quite hard to pick up the individual sentences. While I can read the English, I can hear the Hindi, which is good. And this Amitabh thing started way back then? Yeah, I was very lucky because I came in right when the whole Indian academic thing was starting. So when I asked him for an interview, it was novel enough that he said yes, much to my surprise. I think he was very amused that someone would possibly find Hindi cinema academic. And he has great respect for academia, his father spending a lot of stress and strain getting his PhD in Cambridge. So he said yes more out of disbelief than anything else -- it certainly wasn't because of my credentials. And then, like a dog with a slipper, I just wouldn't let go! Has he read the book? What does he think? Yeah, he's read it. He thinks it's 'cool.' Which I found hard to believe, but there we go. As you see at the end of the book, we had a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about stuff, but we ended up at a happy, um, medium. Did he make you take anything out of the book? Did you make him read it before you published it? No, he didn't. And yeah, out of courtesy, I did. I gave it to him to read, which was pretty useful because he corrected certain things and suggested certain others. He never said, 'Don't write that.' He might say, 'Is that word a bit harsh?' And I'd say, 'No.' (Laughs) You know what I mean? It wasn't a collaborative process in any way but I did let him read it. Were there bits you were afraid of writing about him? No, I don't think I was exactly afraid of writing anything. He was a friend. I was harangued by one interviewer who said there isn't anything new in this book, and that he's stonewalled me. And I said, 'Y'know, whatever.' I mean, if you read it subtly, there is some stuff between the lines. And why should Amitabh bare his soul to everyone? It's like he'll never be able to give enough. So my aim was not to write about big scandals. I don't think that's a way of illuminating someone. As I say at the end of the book -- which I guess you'll get to in about two hours; it's a really light read -- that I went about it the wrong way. I was so fixated with the images and the myths of him that I tried to get them to line up to find the small guy inside; the man behind the curtain, you know, like in The Wizard Of Oz. And actually what I should have done -- which would be the more radical and feminine way of doing it, and not something the haranguing interviewer would have liked -- would have been to actually start from the guy that I know, and reach out to the myths from there. It would have been smaller, gentler. In the picture: Amitabh, in a still from Kala PatharAlso Read: Bollywood's Sexiest Actresses
It is important to note that your book isn't a biography, though.
In the West, biography is really macho. There's this one biographer, who did George Orwell's biography, who went to his widow and demanded that he have carte blanche, to go through and write whatever he wanted, whatever he saw as objective truth. I'm sorry, but that's not objective truth. Julian Barnes wrote a great book called Flaubert's Parrot, where he wrote that biography is like a net, and you catch some fish -- but the water, the life, is gone. So whatever you do, biography is a series of facts chosen by the biographer. It's not a story, and there's no definitive story. And that's what I'm trying to get across in this book, in my random, goofy way. It's a book about biography as much as it is about Bollywood, and about Amitabh. It's also about the process of biography, and the pretentions of writing a biography. How forthcoming was Bollywood to you, overall? Well, it was over a long period of time, and not just about the book. And I've put in the time, been patient. People ask, 'How can you do it, being white?' Can you imagine? Or as Indian journalists ask, 'How can you get such access? Is it because you're white?' There's copy that says 'another fair skinned...' Can you imagine if any newspaper in England said 'another brown skinned chap?' It'd be total uproar! It's just that sometimes people were forthcoming, and sometimes not. And a lot of people would tell me, off the record, how Bachchan had ruined the industry in the 1980s, but then it's stunningly absent when it came to me writing things down. Was the whole process like you'd expected it to be? I didn't have any expectations when I first came over. It's like walking into an entirely new planet. So it was as bizarre and as random. Yeah, I do like it. It can be infuriating and draining, but it's very rich and a great culture. I think you have to have a really good sense of humour to get by in Bollywood. It's sublime, ridiculous, moving... I am laughing at it, but not in a cruel way. Sometimes it's funny. And God knows, Indians laugh at it; Bollywood laughs at itself. Who were the people you met, over your Bollywood years, who you'd term really interesting? The people that I found interesting, that I gelled with, were people around my own age. Manisha (Koirala) and me became friends, and she's just lovely. She had enough worldliness in her that we understood each other. I'm very loyal to her. What I find interesting about the industry is that people have a particular kind of energy, a Bombay-film energy, which I don't have. I don't have the ability to keep going until 4 am. I don't have that kind of drive and energy which they have. And I find it fascinating, that single-minded devotion and ability to live, eat and sleep films. It's a drive to create, and the people I've met (here) who have it are Ashu(tosh) Gowariker, Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Karan Johar, Javed Akhtar. Those are the people I really enjoyed the dynamic with, and their worldviews. And Ashu is especially great, because he responds well to criticism. In the picture: Amitabh, in a still from Kabhi Alvida Naa KehnaOriginally posted by: umi82990
Btw...Fan_of_Big_B...great to see u active here...we are really very happy that more n more members are getting active😊
😛😛 thx