Bachchan sets the record straight
- timesofindia.com
The country’s media has been saddled with a somewhat improbable task by Amitabh Bachchan. The Bollywood superstar wants Indian newspapers and news channels to find the mangalik tree which Aishwarya Rai supposedly had to marry before doing the real thing with Abhishek Bachchan.
Friday has been an important day in Amitabh’s life for close to three decades now; it is the day of reckoning at the box-office. But this Friday (June 22nd) was about a different kind of a verdict: the 64-year-old actor was at The Times of India’s offices meeting journalists to find out whether the media was "hostile to the Bachchans".
"I’d really like to know the answer," he said. "And, if there are any doubts, I want to set the record straight."
Issue number one, not surprisingly, was a tree that captured the nation’s imagination in the run-up to Bollywood’s wedding number one. The media repeatedly reported that Aishwarya had got hitched to a tree before her wedding with Abhishek to ward off the mangalik dosh that would supposedly bring doom on her new household. According to Amitabh, that was, well, only a "story". "Where is the tree? Please show it to me," he said. "The only person she’s married is my son," he said, adding with his famous deadpan demeanour: "Unless you think Abhishek is a tree."
The actor warmed to the topic and expressed amazement that the media had consistently carried such stories. "I don’t know what this mangalik-tangalik is. Our family is not like that and we have not even seen Aishwarya’s janampatri," he declared.
Straight from a board meeting of ABCL, now back in the black, Bachchan was in corporate mode with striped navy suit, blue silk tie and designer glasses. The actor was asked whether he was being overly defensive about media criticism, given that bad press was an inevitable part of celebrityhood and that he was no stranger to it. Bachchan has had a roller-coaster relationship with the press; long years of boycott have been followed by long years of blandishment. There was nothing new to this rough patch, he clarified, but what he was seeking was a sense of how the media-celebrity equation could be worked out to the benefit of both. He accepted that much of the bad blood over the marriage and the unseemly treatment of photographers could have been averted if the young couple had posed graciously for a few photo-ops outside the house.
The wedding shindig over, harder issues were brought up: the land imbroglio and the alleged foreign exchange violation that became a court case. Amitabh, however, refused to get drawn into either. The "farmer" issue was sub-judice and the media would get to know his side of the story as the case unfolded in court, he said. And he was yet to see the court’s notice on the allegations of foreign exchange, he claimed. "But I will follow the law of the land, my conscience and do what I think is morally right," he added.
But the one subject that kept cropping up during the three-hour marathon session was the wedding. "Every day, some newspaper or channel says that this girl is a curse on her new family. How many clarifications do we issue? How many newspaper cuttings do we reply to?" Amitabh asked, explaining why the family had not responded to date: "Yeh sab badi tucchh baatein hai, badi chhoti baatein hai, socha dhyan nahin dena chahiye (These were very trivial issues which, we felt, should not be given importance)."
Repeatedly screening a baseless story, he said, was a "sanctification of trivia" and gave the example of how a visit to a temple in Benaras on the birth anniversary of his father, the late Harivanshrai Bachchan, was reported as an attempt to rid Aishwarya of her mangalik dosh.
The serious agenda did not come in the way of a few laughs. After the initial sobriety, when both parties had sniffed each other out, there was a relaxing of guard.
