Bollywood found itself dragged into a controversy when a stand-up comedian Tanmay Bhat put up a clip spoofing two of India’s greatest icons — cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and playback singer Lata Mangeshkar. 
The clip was in the vein of what is known as a roast in the world of stand-up comedy in which insults are exchanged. In this case, it dwelt on a cooked up jealousy of Sachin towards Virat Kohli, who is in blistering batting form. A voice mimicking Lata interferes with a comment leading to abuses. 
The clip made it abundantly clear that it was a spoof but many didn’t see the humour in it and thought that it was derogatory. Anupam Kher, for example, tweeted, ‘I am 9 times winner of #BestComicActor. Have a great sense of humor. But This’s NOT humor. #Disgusting&Disrespectful’. 
Riteish Deshmukh too tweeted, ‘Am absolutely shocked. Disrespect is not cool and neither is it funny.’ Shatrughan Sinha went a step further and said in an interview that he would “recommend fast-track criminal cases” because the entire nation was humiliated by this. Javed Akhtar said that the man who made such a joke had the mind of a cockroach. 
There was an irony in Bollywood, which relentlessly complains of censorship, railing against something that they didn’t like but then there has always been hypocrisy in the film industry. 
One of the few voices which didn’t ask for the comedian’s head was of Sonam Kapoor. In a series of tweets, she tried to defend him: ‘Being living legends I know @sachin_rt and @mangeshkarlata don’t even know and care about what’s going on!stop spewing hate on their behalf!’, ‘Don’t you guys think there are issues that are more important than @thetanmay snapchat jokes??? I’m in shock with this over reaction!’, ‘Dear @thetanmay ,being your friend I know what you say and do is never to offend, but to make people laugh..’ 
But she was pilloried on social networking by trolls who began to abuse her. Meanwhile Lata Mangeshkar herself gave a very measured statement which said that she had not seen the clip and didn’t intend to, and had no idea who the person was who had made this clip.


Veteran spat


Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher are two veteran actors of the film industry whose names would rank among the best that Bollywood has hosted. Both got their initial foundation in acting at the National School of Drama in New Delhi and struggled their way up in Hindi films. 
Naseeruddin for a long time worked only in art or middle brow movies but later decided that he would do commercial cinema too. Kher never had such a dilemma and soon after a brilliant acting role in Saaransh, leapt lock stock and barrel into masala entertainers of every variety. 
The two have never really spoken for or against each other. But that changed recently when Shah, during the course of an interview while promoting his latest movie Waiting, said, ‘A person who has never lived in Kashmir has started a fight for Kashmiri Pandits. Suddenly, he became a displaced person’. This seemed like targeted towards Kher, a Kashmiri Pandit who was born outside Kashmir in Shimla but speaks for the rights of the community displaced from the state because of terrorism. 
Kher immediately launched a riposte on twitter, ‘Shah Saab ki Jai Ho. By that logic NRI’s should not think about India at all.:)’ Cronies of Kher in Bollywood, and he has a number of them because of his politics, also went on the offensive against Shah questioning his right to say something like this. Shah later denied having ever made that statement and said that it was misreporting. But it is hard to see how someone can invent such a statement by him.


Refused again


Hrithik Roshan caused Karan Johar considerable anxiety after he backed out of the movie Shuddhi that the latter was producing. Different reasons were attributed. One was of course the personal troubles he had been having then with his marriage breaking down. 
Another rumour said that he wanted far more of the cut from profits than Karan was willing to give. Hrithik’s present good run actually began with Agneepath which had been produced by Karan and so one would have thought that it would lead to a better partnership but that has not happened. 
There’s more. A gossip website reported that Karan had again approached Hrithik to act in a movie and had been rebuffed again. Apparently, the reason was that it was a historical project set around Partition and Hrithik is right now working on Mohenjo Daro, which is also a period film. And he didn’t want to do two back to back movies in the same genre.




Price of ignorance


It has been sometime since Hema Malini got into the big bad world of politics, but it looks like she has still some learning to do. Especially when it comes to her identity as an actress clashing with that of a politician. 
Hema represents the constituency of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh. And the city was recently witness to riots by followers of a cult when government officials moved to clear them out of encroached land. The cult members were armed, something which was not anticipated, and in the violence that followed 24 people were killed including policemen. As the Member of Parliament from Mathura, the least that was expected from Hema was that she would be abreast of the developments. But, alas, that was not to be. Instead, on the day of the riot, she put up a photo of a film shooting that she was doing. Realising how it had become a public relations disaster, she soon deleted the photos and left for Mathura. 
But she still tried to defend herself saying that she had been far away and not aware of how serious the situation was. Some would say if she was not aware of what is happening in the place she represents in Parliament, then she should probably return to full time acting. 


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