When an avowedly apolitical Amitabh Bachchan is the chief guest, it's unfair for any host to make any kind of political remark from the same stage where he is seated. But the co-editor of Bread Beauty Revolution, a book on writer-filmmaker Khwaja Ahmed Abbas (better known as the man who gave Amitabh Bachchan a break in Hindi cinema with a film titled Saat Hindustani), seemed oblivious to this simple courtesy when she brought Kashmiri politics to the platform.
Urdu poetry and culture dripped at the book release function of Bread Beauty Revolution at Nehru Centre which was apt because KA Abbas and the first prime minister of India shared a compatible equation. But one of the co-editors, unnecessarily and quite irrelevantly, spoke of her Kashmiri roots and talked of the referendum which Panditji had turned down.
Bachchan's family, as almost everybody knows, was close to the Nehru family, and this was not the time or place to refer to a referendum vs Nehru. Doubly so because, after being singed by Bofors as a parliamentarian, Amitabh not only gave up his hard-won Lok Sabha seat but thereafter also steadfastly stayed away from all things political. Even if wife Jaya continued to be associated with Mulayam Singh and the Samajwadi Party, AB did not consort with any political party although he has friends in almost every ideological group.
When it was his turn to speak at the book release, Amitabh began by saying that he knew nothing about communism, by which he probably meant that he wanted to have nothing to do with any 'ism'. One of KA Abbas' nieces who spoke earlier, narrated a sweet tale of how she used to take the same bus as Amitabh did when all of them were college students in Delhi. She said that for some reason she looked forward to the tall, lanky guy sitting next to her in the bus, but he never did. Years later, when her uncle, KA Abbas launched Amitabh Bachchan, she always felt that she had discovered him before anybody else.
Amitabh too, remembered the bus that they all took to college. But he recalled that there was another guy called Pran who took the same bus. One day when there wasn't enough place for everybody, the girls wanted only Pran to get into the bus. He said, with his characteristic poker face, it was a case of 'Pran jaye but Bachchan na jaye ...'
AB and Shabana Azmi were easily the show stealers of the evening with a natural comfort before an audience. Shabana read out excerpts from the book which was like a consummate performance and not like a prosaic book reading. Her eyes twinkled as she told Amitabh, "I don't know if you wanted to read this but I've stolen it from you", and proceeded to read out, sorry, perform, a passage on Amitabh's debut in films as written by Abbas.
Besides being excellent before the camera, Shabana and Amitabh are also extremely articulate in both English and Hindi and Ms Azmi speaks chaste Urdu as well. Both of them are children of well-known writers (of Kaifi Azmi and Harivanshrai Bachchan, respectively) and the two celebrity residents of Juhu have a great rapport. Another common connect they had was with KA Abbas. While Amitabh deeply respected the man who gave him a break in Saat Hindustani , Shabana knew Abbas, her father's close friend, from the time she was a little girl. In fact, Faslah, her first film as actor in 1974, was also a K A Abbas film.
Eerily, Faslah was about a rich man who knocks down a man while driving but tries to escape punishment by having his driver take the rap for it. Until an eye-witness identifies him in court as the man who was behind the wheel.
Considering how the Salman Khan case is going in court today, one can only conclude that KA Abbas was prophetic. Or maybe, human frailties remain static; only the time period changes.
While the case drags on, Salman notches up hit after hit at the box office. I wouldn't call Prem Ratan Dhan Payo a superhit although Salman's PR machinery works overtime to declare every film of his a goldmine. The film did expectedly rake in huge figures over a four-day Diwali weekend. By the time Monday rolled along, the PR department had lined up another press conference, "To thank the media for its support". Salman should have also thanked his close friend and Congress politician Baba Siddiqui. All the kids in and around my lane in Bandra (the Mumbai suburb where Siddiqui and Salman reside) were generously given free tickets by Baba's people to go watch Prem Ratan Dhan Payo and fill the theatres.
Bharathi S Pradhan is a senior journalist and author
