Vidya Balan is at her best when she's playing a badass. And she's playing it to the hilt, reprising Rituparna Sen's Begum Jaan character from Rajkahini. Like Rishi Kapoor in his tweets, from the ch... word to MC and BC, Vidya spits it all out, taking a swipe at the fact that women aren't even allowed to abuse and when they do, they end up abusing their own gender of mothers and sisters!

This information is courtesy some uncensored footage I watched with Mahesh Bhatt (producer) and Srijit Mukherji (director).

Mercifully, while Rajkahini stretched to nearly 2 hours and 50 minutes, Begum Jaan is "just about two hours," said Mahesh, accepting that Bengali cinema tended to be "told leisurely". Srijit himself smiled that Rajkahini was like the first show of a play. You correct your mistakes for the next viewing.

Begum Jaan has that from-the-gut feel of films like Arth that Mahesh once made. The promo is out on March 15. There's a line where Begum Jaan is given an emphatic deadline of one month. That will also underline the release date - exactly a month later on April 15.

The real surprise is that Mahesh Bhatt's bete noire , the censor board, actually came in for a bit of praise from him and Srijit. The censors were neither uppity nor showed any agro but were actually helpful in suggesting that the "ch..." from the MC-BC abuse be replaced. Vidya will thus spout "madarjaat " and "behenjaat".

A compliment from Mahesh Bhatt should bring a smile to Pahlaj Nihalani's face. Incidentally, for those counting the days, Pahlaj's term as chairperson of CBFC expires next January. "Unless terminated earlier," he grinned.

Perhaps Rishi Kapoor should also start using substitutes like madarjaat and behenjaat. Maybe it's also time someone told the arrogant Rishi (who fancies himself a master of the English language) that a person who tweets an inconvenient retort in perfectly parliamentary language is not the same as an abusive troll.

But hubris makes Rishi use cuss words like it's his birthright to do so. When there were tweets (not necessarily abusive) on Saif and Kareena naming their son Taimur, the granduncle let forth a volley of four-letter words.

Last Sunday Rishi tweeted, "What do Rishi Kapoor and Karan Johar have in common?" He expected only a sweet reply like, "Both named their sons after their respective fathers."

But when one person replied, "I thought both are useless and why I have to watch them" (which was questionable grammar but not abusive), Rishi replied with the "P" word - one that rhymes with "trick".

His tweets are replete with the "eff" word, the "D" word, and "F...ing b...ch screw you" (to a lady). Rishi should know that abuse means he's not felicitous, it betrays his inability to be effective without being foul. But he has 1.58 million followers on Twitter who find an abusive celebrity highly entertaining.

Here's something about the other celebrity who was in the news for right and wrong reasons. Wrong, when Karan Johar said that Kangana could leave the film industry if she didn't like it. Right, when he opted to have twin children through surrogacy.

Wrong, when the coarse Samajwadi Party politician Abu Azmi (Ayesha Takia's father-in-law) preyed on Karan's sexuality, crudely questioned his move to have children through surrogacy and asked why he couldn't have adopted instead. Vicious, yes. Specious too because Islam does not recognise adoption, rendering Azmi's vitriol even more suspect.

But very right when Abu Azmi's son, Farhan, found out Karan's number and told the new father that he didn't share his Abbu's views. Farhan showed grace in distancing himself from his father's polemic against Karan.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author