This is the most sensational controversy to hit Bollywood in recent memory and the dirty linen is all being washed in public. Some time ago a question to Kangana Ranaut at an interview about being dropped from Aashiqui 3 got the response that that “exes do silly things”.
People immediately inferred she was referring to Hrithik and he had been responsible for it. Hrithik then tweeted, without naming her, that there were rumours around about a relationship of his and there was more possibility of him dating the Pope than the woman.
The matter simmered for some time until last week the whole can of worms opened when a tabloid ran a front-page story that said that Hrithik had sent a legal notice to Kangana to not talk on this issue and apologise.
Kangana countered with her own legal notice to him that revealed all the details of the alleged affair.
According to Hrithik’s version, Kangana came up to him at a party and thanked him for a mail she had received from him commending her performance in Queen. He had not seen Queen and told her that it was not his e-mail account and gave her his real e-mail address. And then she started sending a barrage of mails to him on it — as many as 1,439, which were personal in nature. The legal notice even alludes to a mental ailment called Asperger’s Syndrome that she suffers from and alleges that it made her imagine the affair. And that she also called his father Rakesh Roshan and involved him in her delusion.
In reply, Kangana’s notice says that she had been invited to many of their family events like birthday parties proving that she was close to him. And that the mail ID, which Hrithik denies, was in fact given to her by him because at the time he had not divorced his wife. After the first media face-off, the tabloid ran another big story quoting a close friend of Kangana revealing how the affair had started after Hrithik’s break up with Barbara Mori during the shooting of Kites, in which Kangana was also acting.
And then when his divorce was coming through, he had even come and proposed to her, which she accepted. And that they had continued with the relationship for a long time but he was not willing to commit. He would back out and then try to patch up with her. He even, it was alleged, got someone to follow her movements and got jealous when a young superstar began to woo her.
Hrithik put out one more public statement after this in which he refused to engage further in the issue and sought to bring the tempo down. But it is a little late and the story now has got a life of its own.


Back on the hitlist

After Shaandaar, Alia Bhatt was deeply depressed because for the first time in her career she came face to face with a debacle. But her latest movie, Kapoor & Sons, which released last week, looks like it will redeem her.
Critics have only good words for it and commercially too it is picking up. Alia says that she has a rule for accepting movies now: to look at a prospective project as if she is doing a movie for the first time. That is a quite a mature way to approach her career for someone so young.
Recently, there was a curious bit of news about how Alia lost out on Neerja, a movie that subsequently went to Sonam and became a superhit. The reason: because she was apparently not tall enough to assay the character. Well, that is one thing that Alia cannot change.

New actors

There is a peculiar phenomenon in the works in Bollywood. Film directors, who so far had been content with being behind the camera, have decided to become actors in their own movies. And we are not talking blink and miss appearances like Subhash Ghai used to do in his movies once upon a time. These are full fledged roles assaying a major character.
In the recently released Jai Gangaajal, the sequel to the hit Gangaajal, director Prakash Jha took for himself one of the meatiest roles of the movie. Now comes news that Nishikant Kamat, who has directed movies like Force and Drishyam will be in his next movie Rocky Handsome that releases on March 25. He will be playing the villain against the hero of the movie John Abraham. The reason that Kamat is said to have donned this role is because of another actor who was supposed to play the role backing out at the last minute.
Before Kamat and Jha, Anurag Kashyap and Tigmanshu Dhulia have also played long roles in movies. Judging by the response they got and also the flop that Jai Gangaajal became, directors should probably stick to what they know best.


Politics calling

An actor who is making all the waves on the political front is Anupam Kher. He has been consistently in the news defending the government as it gets accused of fostering an atmosphere of cultural intolerance and also browbeating those who are against it, like students of Jawaharlal Nehru University, an institute that has traditionally been a harbour for Communist ideas.
Recently many student leaders there were arrested after they were charged with raising anti-national slogans. They got wide support from the media and a section of the intelligentsia.
Last week Kher visited the campus for a screening of one of his films and gave a speech attacking the student leaders there. Sometime before that, his strong words in a debate organised by a newspaper went viral on the net. He now almost seems like a spokesperson for the ruling establishment.  But while Kher’s wife is a parliamentarian belonging to the ruling party, he himself is not formally in it. Most people however are certain that his current public profile is a stepping-stone to enter into active politics, the only question mark being on the way in which he will enter politics. Meanwhile he is doing all the right things to keep himself in the minds of the people.

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