There’s something Shakes-pearean — utterly tragi-comic — about Amar Singh. To Big B or not to be is the question.
In fact, on reading Suparna Sharma’s interview with the erstwhile political pasha, in this paper a couple of Sundays ago, I was chortling, but by the end, I reached out for a hanky to dab my tears. Dost dost nahin rahe, and all that.
He would like to never ever talk about the Bachchans, BUT since he’s being quizzed about them, he has to dart his sugar-coated poison pellets. That’s only human. Right.
Snag: In the few face-to-face interactions I had with him, Amar Singh was hardly guilty of humaneness. Example: Mr Amitabh Bachchan was to be wheeled in for emergency surgery. I had dropped in for a visit, only to commit the grave error of reporting that the nation’s longest-surviving superstar was in a bubbly mood, no jitters, no anxiety. When the benign report appeared in print, there was Hamletesque thunder and lightning.
There was a call from Abhishek’s cell phone number, “Hiiiiiiiii baba,” I went sunnily, only to get a gruff rebuttal, “This is Amar Singh, not Baba. Do you know I’m on the board of media groups? I denied access to them. And see what you have done! You better work out your equations with the family. They’re upset. Decide whether you’re a personal or professional friend.” Click, beeeeep. Cellphone switched off. No leeway to say, “But who are you to talk to me like this?”
To be fair to Amar Singh, he could be chummy too. And in one of his more doting spells, he invited me to a congregation of Samajwadi Party workers in Delhi. Whoa!
Without warning, he summoned me to the podium to announce that there was a “jaana-maana patrakar” in their midst. Crimson-faced, I was relieved to an extent, when he introduced me as Khalid Ansari, a media personality who’s truly “jaana maana”. Close shave.
Steadily, Amar Singh became the most-wanted patron on the showbiz circuit. He became family to Boney Kapoor-Sridevi, Jaya Prada, Akshay Kumar and Dimple Kapadia. Rumours had it that Raveena Tandon was boundlessly grateful to him for the National Best Actress Award for Daman. Comparatively, the Congress leader Rajiv Shukla — buddy buddy to Shah Rukh Khan — can’t even be termed second best.
So, I was seeing the rise and rise of Amar Singh from close-up. How come? Largely because I was working on a coffee-table book on Amitabh Bachchan, which meant hobnobbing with the family’s buddies. Bachchan saab, Jayaji, AB Jr and Shweta adored him, lighting up like X’mas trees whenever he stepped in to visit his surrogate family. Harmony unlimited.
Subsequently, I gave up arranging coffee tables. Then poof! A summer or two later, I heard Amar Singh was a no-no, in Delhi as well as in Bolly enclaves. Like it or not, if you’re no longer a power factor, bye bye. Plus one teeny note of disagreement can erase thousands of good deeds done. Obviously I’m referring to the widely-known fact of the family bail-out of the ABCL-collapse crisis. Details unspecified.
Back to Suparna Sharma’s confabulation with Amar Singh, over two cups of chai, it clearly vivified that yesterday’s Bollywood Fix-it politico is still quite shell-shocked about the Bachchan experience. And that’s the moral of the story: Friendships, relationships and “family” feelings in Bollywood are transient. There has to be THE END. No point in pining for a remake.