You can argue that it is Shah Rukh Khan (or even Sachin Tendulkar) who is India’s biggest brand, and in a way you would be right. However if you want to talk of a colossus who has straddled the scene of Hindi films, for the longest time, and held an entire nation in his thrall, it would have to be Amitabh Bachchan. At age 68 he is today, as popular as he ever was at the zenith of his stardom; or even perhaps more so!
Amitabh Bachchan wasn’t a sudden or instantly huge success in the way that someone like Rajesh Khanna was – to be sure Khanna perhaps had more women swooning over him and marrying his photos and perhaps in his time he was a bigger superstar than Bachchan. However Bachchan, as the angry young man with the brooding eyes, the evocative baritone and the lanky long legs was a whole new phenomenon in Bollywood. And as the have-not who stood up to the haves (witness his line Main aaj bhi phenke hue paise nahin uthata from Deewaar which showed the poor man’s dignity in the face of affluence) he charted a new course for the Hindi film hero, who had hitherto been the lover, the tragedy hero and so on in the main. He received as much adulation from the male cinema viewer as the female.
He is the one entity in Hindi cinema, who has risen, phoenix like, the most number of times from various situations some of this own making and some not – in 1982 he suffered a very serious injury during the filming of Coolie that had him hospitalized for months – he survived that and later also overcame a condition that he was diagnosed with; a condition called Myasthenia gravis (an autoimmune neuromuscular disease causing fluctuating muscle weakness and fatigue). Read More>>>
