Aamir Khan had crossed 40 when he told us he was an angry young post-grad student in Rang de Basanti. Raju Shelar/Firstpost
by Sandip Roy
Finally a rare moment of real honesty from a film star.
Tollywood’s Sabyasachi Chakravarty has made quite a career out of playing Felu-da, Satyajit Ray’s intrepid Bengali detective. Well, intrepid in a very Bengali sort of way, i e he spends a lot of time doing mental gymnastics. But he does occasionally sprint down alleys and jump up from the floor.
Now Chakravarty says that after five Felu-da feature films, and ten telefilms, he’s planning to call it a day.
“The main problem is my paunch,” the fifty-five year old actor told The Telegraph. Chakravarty’s latest Felu-da adventure, Royal Bengal Rahasya, directed by Ray’s son Sandip, is about to release soon. He says he’s unsure what the audience will make of him. “I know they will say ‘Feluda thik ache (is OK) but his paunch is an eyesore’, and I am ready for it. I know my paunch is an eyesore. So, I think it’s time for me to call it quits.”
SRK is trying to become a superhero, the last bastion of the ageless star. Raju Shelar/Firstpost
Now when was the last time you heard something that candid from one of our Bollywood stars?
The middle-aged college student
Why can’t our stars allow themselves to age? They know they are aging. The audience knows they are aging. But the myth of Bollywood creates a sort of Botox bubble of denial where our stars creak on forever, and ever and ever. (The heroine turnover, of course, is much quicker.) It seems we are afraid that if the stars of our teen years age onscreen we’ll have to admit our own middle age as well. Instead in the darkness of the theater we create a Peter Pan Neverland where the good times never have to stop as long as there’s enough make-up and soft focus.
In the old days it was particularly egregious. Dev Anand’s collars climbed higher, while his scarves and primly buttoned shirts and sweaters tried to hide the march of wrinkles. But the Evergreen hero gamely romanced on moving from Tina Munim to Padmini Kohlapuri. Dev saab was at least dapper and relatively well-preserved. Raj Kapoor, on the other hand, looked quite the tired old roué when he romanced a fresh-faced Hema Malini in Sapnon ka Saudagar. Then there was Manoj Kumar who decided that in his 50s he could play a college kid in Clerk.
These days the stars have a longer shelf-life. They go to the gym, they take their protein supplements, they talk to magazines endlessly about their diets. What they don’t realise is it might make them fitter, but not younger. It just turns them into strangely bionic men, with aging faces grafted onto ageless bodies. (Remember Shah Rukh in Om Shanti Om?) It also feeds into the fantasy that they can be teen idols forever, that youth is all about the six-pack, rather than the Brat pack.
Aamir Khan had crossed 40 when he told us he was an angry young post-grad student in Rang de Basanti. That worked well, at least well enough, for him to come back as a 21-year-old 44-year-old in 3 Idiots. If his nephew Imran Khan hadn’t come on the scene, chances are he’d still be trying to pull those roles off.
Sanjay Dutt, many kilos removed from his skinny Rocky debut, ambled through Munnabhai over two-decades later as a middle-aged med student.
Shah Rukh Khan basically had to be booted out of his cute aww shucks college-kid persona by a new generation of actors who were actually closer to college-going age. And now at 45, SRK is trying to become a superhero, the last bastion of the ageless star. Superman, we all know, never grows old.
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