Guide to Greatness

When you spend 51 years in the film industry, you must be doing some things right. Amitabh Bachchan first made a mark with his trademark baritone, narrating Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome in 1969. It’s 2021, possibly the final season of Kaun Banega Crorepati was on air on Indian TVs, and fans still can’t get enough of the septuagenarian superstar and his big, booming voice, now overshadowed by only his growing elegance and charisma. I’ve been a ringside spectator of Mr. Bachchan’s grace and greatness since 2006. My first ever interview with the ‘superstar of the millennium’, a term that was hot and happening back then, was at a launch event for Ram Gopal Varma’s Nishabd (2007). The event was held at a swanky 5-star hotel in Mumbai; it was attended by the film’s entire cast, along with RGV. Being one of my first ever professional assignments, I was hell-bent on reaching at least 15 minutes before time. But it was a herculean task, considering I got to know about the lunch-time event at 11 am. I had to travel from Mumbai’s Lalbaug area to Juhu, a 1-hour 20-minute distance by road, a little more so for a penniless, first-time reporter like me, who was going to travel through the local trains.

Nevertheless, I huffed and puffed, and by 12.30, I had reached the sprawling Juhu hotel. I was ushered into one of the gigantic ballrooms, decked up with gargantuan posters of Nishabd. I was surprised that the place was full, with a melange of print and TV media. Mr. Bachchan and the other members of the cast and director RGV soon appeared on stage, did the usual jing-bang of poster unveiling et al and the floor was thrown open to questions. I had a ball of a time asking Mr. Bachchan a question about a 64-year-old actor’s confidence in romancing an 18-year-old co-star onscreen. The event concluded as fast and as seamlessly as it had begun. An apprehensive cub reporter like me had a great morale boost about the film industry and its ultra-professional ways. Little did I know that professionalism and punctuality were a rare phenomenon.

A week later, I was assigned the task of covering a film shoot at Kamalistan Studio, where a colorful Holi song was going to be picturized with a senior superstar and his newer co-stars. The director of the film was one of the Hindi cinema’s most celebrated filmmakers as well. My call time was 1 pm, so I huffed and puffed again and reached the sets by 12.30. An hour later, I had been introduced to every star manager and publicist on the set, a handful of journalists and then most crew members and technicians, too. The actors and the director were nowhere in sight. Two hours later, the stars showed up, and shooting began. I was slated to conduct short interviews with the superstar and the new actors. I was able to complete my tasks by 5 pm. Definitely not as smooth as the Nishabd launch. I thought to myself, that was an event, this was a movie set, the chaos is totally different. A few days later, I was to cover the launch of another film, an event that was again being hosted at a swanky 5-Star in Juhu, and the event began an hour late because the actors, all newcomers, hadn’t arrived. The air of professionalism that I had taken for granted was slowly vanishing. When I discussed my conundrum with my seniors at Screen, a weekly newspaper then published by The Indian Express Group, I was given a lunch-time class by my colleagues and then-editor Bhawana Somaaya that Mr. Bachchan and his time etiquettes were cut from a different cloth. Suffice to say, I now had a renewed perspective on both the standard time modules of the film industry and Amitabh Bachchan, too.