“If I failed in politics, the reason is I did not have the potential”, Amitabh Bachchan tells Jyothi Venkatesh

By Jyothi Venkatesh

Today is Mega star Amitabh Bachchan’s 79th birthday . To commemorate the grand occasion, I reproduce an earlier free and frank interview with the super star taken about a decade ago and wish him a happy birthday today. Though he played a flamboyant and edgy character in his film Buddhah Hoga Terra Baap, Amitabh Bachchan impressing the audiences with a realistic performance as Dr Prabhakar Anand, a retired Principal of a private college in Bhopal in Prakash Jha’s Aarakshan, in which the thespian had been pitted with actors like Manoj Bajpayee, Saif Ali Khan, Prateik Babbar and Deepika Padukone.

“My role is that of an erudite and almost idealist who wants to have an egalitarian atmosphere, where everyone gets an equal opportunity. I conduct private classes in my own house for students who cannot afford the exorbitant coaching classes. In fact, I even employ a dalit teacher in my school to teach the students. It is for the first time in my entire career as an actor that I am acting in an issue based film, which sets out to tackle the pros and cons of the issue of reservation and caste system in our society,” admits Amitabh when I meet him for this interview at Mehboob Studios. “There are several examples of issue based films in the past which have percolated in the society and benefitted it. Like Michael Douglas’s film about nuclear reaction. Every film sets out to tell the audience that victory of the good over the evil forces is always there”, he adds.

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Amitabh confesses that he had a wonderful experience working with a production house like that of Prakash Jha. “If the working atmosphere on the sets is good, the director would be able to extract good work from the actors. Everyone should learn from a production house like that of Prakashji how to enforce discipline, manage production, how to handle the call sheets of the artistes and where you should ask your actor to stand. To be confident enough to face the media, I even made it a point to go through a lot of literature about the caste system and the issue of reservation, because I thought that if what I speak is going to be contrary to what the film is about, it will create conflicts.”

Amitabh candidly admits that he was not as conversant as Prakash Jha about the pros and cons of the system of reservation in our country because he had never paid any attention to it or for that matter even thought about it or even made to believe in it. “I was just another idle citizen of the country till Prakashji told me about the various aspects of the caste system. In fact, I found his research was so exact and definite that it opened my eyes and also many doors. Though the shooting of the film was over, we still kept on talking about the various nuances about the caste system.”

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Amitabh says that he had never understood the caste system because he was brought up in a family which had never preached or believed in the caste system. “My father Dr Harvanshraiji was the first Indian in Allahabad who went in for an inter caste marriage. My father was a kayastha Brahmin while my mother was a Sikh. When it was time to admit me in the school, when the Principal asked him for my surname, he refused to give Srivastava as my surname and mentioned his pen name Bachchan, as my surname, because he did not want my surname to reflect my caste. Though I never came across the caste system when I learnt at a boarding school and did my graduation at the Delhi University, it cropped up for the first time only when I decided to contest the elections as a candidate of the Congress party in 1994. If I failed in politics, the reason is I did not have the potential”.

Amitabh Bachchan confesses that he wants to learn a lot from the new generation of actors, who he feels are much more confident to face the camera effortlessly than the actors who belong to his generation. “I found Prateik Babbar natural since he does not behave like he was acting in front of the camera. If you want to progress, it is very pertinent that you accept the change. However, I still do not subscribe to the notion that you should indulge in passionate lip to lip kissing, mouth expletives and do explicit scenes in films, since society has changed. Though there are actors who do not find anything wrong in doing those scenes, I have till date not done that and do not intend changing, though I’d say to each his own.”