Mumbai: Veteran screenwriter Salim Khan of the Salim-Javed duo once spoke about the rough patch in veteran Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan.
An archival footage, shared by Lehren, shows Salim deconstructing the impact of setbacks on the life of Big B.
He said, “I’m not a psychiatrist so, I can’t pinpoint and specifically tell what went wrong with Amitabh Bachchan. I’m not very close to him at the moment, I once was. I have done some 14-15 films with him. Many a time it happens that a person becomes so habitual of winning that when they lose it comes as a shocker.”
He further mentioned, “I’ll give you an example, if Sri Lanka wins a cricket match, it comes off as a surprise that they won. If West Indies loses a match that comes off as a surprise too. Amitabh Bachchan became so habitual of winning that even a minor setback or a failure had a deep impact on him, and he didn’t take it very well”.
The video appears to be from the 80s or early 90s when Big B was neck-deep in trouble. In the 1980s, VCR made its way to India as a technological advancement in the field of entertainment which led to a crisis in the Hindi film industry, the wave took a toll on Big B’s stardom as well.
Then in the mid-1980s, Big B got embroiled in the alleged Bofors scandal, implicating Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and several other members of the Indian and Swedish governments. Big B on his part, has however maintained that his name was “planted” in the scandal.
Later, when Big B left behind the shadow of the Bofors ‘scandal’, he got drowned in huge debts when his production house Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited incurred huge losses. The production house ran into debt after the failure of the 1996 edition of the Miss World beauty pageant. That was the lowest point of Big B as he had more than Rs 100 crore in debt to lend to creditors. It was the quiz-based reality show ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati’ that bailed him out of troubled waters.
Meanwhile, Salim Khan, who is the father of Bollywood superstar Salman Khan, was recently seen in the streaming documentary ‘Angry Young Men’ along with his writing partner Javed Akhtar.