Popular actress of southern films, Kajal Aggarwal, is all set to marry entrepreneur Gautam Kitchlu on October 30 in Mumbai. The actress took to Instagram to share the news with fans in a long note she posted on Tuesday.
“I said yes”, she headlined her note, which read: “It gives me immense joy to share that I am getting married to Gautam Kitchlu, on October 30, 2020 in Mumbai, in a small, private ceremony surrounded by our immediate families. This pandemic has certainly shed a sobering light on our joy, but we are thrilled to start our lives together and know that all of you will be cheering us on in spirit. I thank you for all the love you have showered upon me over the years and we seek your blessings as we embark upon this incredible new journey. I will still continue doing what I cherish the most – entertaining my audience – now, with a whole new purpose and meaning. Thank you for your unending support.”
Congratulations have poured in on social media from friends, colleagues and fans.
Vishnu Manchu, Kajal Aggarwal play siblings in ‘Mosagallu’
“Congratulations Kajal. Wishing you both a lifetime of happiness,” Hansika Motwani commented.
“Many many congratulations love,” actress Mehreen commented.
Kajal is best known for her roles in “Magadheera”, “Kavacham”, “Arya 2”, “Thuppaki”, and ” Paris Paris”. In Bollywood, she has been seen in “Singham” and “Special 26”.
Maniesh Paul: Amitabh Bachchan continues to inspire me.
Maniesh took to Instagram, where he shared a string of pictures along with the cine icon from the sets of the popular quiz show, Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC).
Expressing his fondness for Amitabh, Maniesh reminisced his childhood memories of the actor.
Maniesh Paul: Amitabh Bachchan continues to inspire me.
He wrote: “I’m a Delhi boy, who lived in a small place called Malviya Nagar. Still remember the time when we used to watch movies and I would force my mother to write MARD on my chest as my HERO did that in a film…”
“Would make sure I was the first to be in the que to buy milk so i could say ‘HUM JAHAN KHADE HOTE HAIN LINE WAHIN SE SHURU HOTI Hai. The moment my mom would see him she would say ‘Mickey, tu zaroor inke saath kaaam karega’.
Maniesh then wished Amitabh, who turned 78 on Sunday.
“And the day came, when I hosted an episode of KBC with him! I have shared the stage with Bachchan sir on many occasions thereafter and I have to say that he continues to inspire me no end…I can go on and on and ona Wish you a very happy birthday, @amitabhbachchan sir May god bless you with health, happiness and love always! Your fanboy for life #mp#bigb #bachchansir #superstar #films,” he said.
Ananth Mahadevan is off to the Busan International Film Festival with his new film, and he has shared what compelled him to make his latest…writes Arundhuti Banerjee
Titled “Bittersweet”, Mahadevan’s new film has been nominated in the Competition section of the prestigious film fest that will take place between October 21 and October 30 this year.
Mahadevan says the condition of female sugarcane cutters in the Beed district of Maharashtra was an eye-opener, and he felt he had to tell their story.
“It was so disappointing to realise that something like this is going on in India, in Maharashtra. When I started probing the issue and researching, there was not much document or hard material available. It is a volatile subject and is about human survival at a humongous cost, under an excruciating circumstance,” Mahadevan told IANS.
Elaborating on the issue, the filmmaker said as sugarcane is a seasonal crop, the cutters had to earn money within six months so that they could survive for the rest of the year. Since menstruation is part of a woman’s life, if any female worker takes a day off during that time of the month, the authorities not only deduct her salary but also of the male members of her family.
He continued, “You must not forget that India is the second-largest sugarcane exporter after Brazil. But what is the price that the authority is demanding to achieve economical success, from these sugarcane cutters — especially the women workers who are working on the field?”
“There is a nexus between sugarcane barons, field contractors, the politicians, and local gynaecologists. The solution that they came out with is hysterectomy surgery — removal of the uterus of women who are working in the sugarcane fields. Ten years ago, when the issue was raised, the local doctors, with constant counselling and brainwashing, made the women understand that removal of the uterus would be beneficial for them. They are told that if there is no uterus, there would be no menstruation problem, and no cancer of the uterus, and they could work freely — no salary cuts! The frightening part is, no women made any complaint initially and later it became a common practice!” he said.
Ananth Mahadevan bittersweet.
According to the filmmaker, the account that is shown in the film is based on news reports as well as interactions with locals and victims.
“Today, when I am talking to you, 90 per cent of the female population of Beed do not have wombs. They cannot give birth to children. They destroyed the biological circle of these women. It left me shaken as a filmmaker,” he added.
The Marathi film features Akshaya Gurav, Suresh Vishwakarma, Anil Nagarkar, Guru Thakur, Asit Redij, and Vinayak Divekarsmita Tambe among others.
Trailer Released
The trailer of the hardhitting film Bittersweet released on Tuesday. Directed by Ananth Mahadevan, the film has been selected for screening at the Busan International Film Festival this year.
“The trailer was a challenge as this subject had never been dealt with before on screen. The launch of the trailer today expectedly brought in a huge viewership and some overwhelming reactions, both for the concept and the visual treatment of a burning topic,” claimed Mahadevan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-qhqYD_4ao
Set in Beed in Maharashtra, the Marathi language film focuses on the inhumane condition of female sugarcane cutters who often go through hysterectomy surgery so that they can get rid off their menstrual cycle and avoid the ‘period leave’ and salary cut. The film huighlights how the whole process is ruining the biological cycle of many women in the district.
The film features Akshaya Gurav, Suresh Vishwakarma, Anil Nagarkar, Guru Thakur, Asit Redij, and Vinayak Divekarsmita Tambe.
The Sriram Raghavan thriller hit Andhadhun, which won Ayushmann Khurrana the National Award as Best Actor, released two years ago on this day. The actor says the film will always be special for him because it gave him the opportunity to do something he had never done before.
The black comedy thriller cast Ayushmann as a pianist who pretends to be blind for musical inspiration, and accidentally becomes witness to a murder. The film directed by Sriram Raghavan also stars Tabu and Radhika Apte.
“Sriram Raghavan is one of the finest minds of our generation and when it comes to clever, psychological thrillers, he is simply a master of the genre. It has been a huge privilege for me to creatively collaborate with Sriram sir and learn from him,” said Ayushmann.
The actor says he has been lucky enough to collaborate with the best directors in Bollywood.
“I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the best visionary filmmakers of our time and I’m honoured that I got the opportunity to work in a Sriram Raghavan film. Yes, I’m known for my progressive social entertainers that leave a message, but what matters most to me is being part of the best cinema that is produced by our industry,” he added.
Ayushmann says “Andhadhun” pushed him as an actor. “I like to experiment, mix it up and push the envelope as an artiste, and Andhadhun gave me the opportunity to do something that I had never done before. I thank Sriram sir for his faith in me and I can’t wait to collaborate with him again, hopefully soon,” he pointed out.
Srishti Jain: Acting felt like a far-fetched dream.
Srishti Jain: Acting felt like a far-fetched dream.
Srishti Jain, who is currently playing the lead role in the show Hamari Wali Good News, says becoming an actor felt like a far-fetched dream.
“I was always fascinated with acting and really wanted to become an actor, but at the same time, it always felt like a far-fetched dream. Owing to the fact that I belong to a family of engineers and doctors, my family was always very sceptical of the industry,” she said.
“My father got a job in Mumbai, and we shifted. I felt like destiny has bought me closer to my dream. That’s when I built up the courage to talk to my parents. I wona¿t lie, it took some time but eventually they agreed. I guess they realised how passionate I was about acting,” she added.
Her struggle didn’t end there.
“The real struggle began when I started auditioning, I knew nothing about the industry or how to go about things. I can account for at least three years of countless auditions while managing my college and lectures. I remember I would travel by metro in those days. It wasn’t easy and there were times when people around me laughed at me, they would taunt me for being stupid and chasing after something that wasn’t guaranteed,” she recalled.
“When I got my first break, I quit design college. That was a huge decision and I was advised against it by everyone, but my parents supported me. Today, I’m glad I took that step, I wouldn’t have been here today without that. Then I pursued my graduation in psychology through correspondence while shooting for my show. God has been great to me and I’m very thankful,” she said.
Talking about her show and her role of Navya, she said: “The show is very interesting. It’s unique, fresh and progressive. Navya is a girl-next-door, she’s strong-headed and believes in standing up for what’s right and voicing her opinion. She’s full of life. She got married quite early because of family pressure. She’s 23 years old and is still a child at heart. But at the same time, she’s mature. She’s always happy and never really gets upset. She also loves everyone.”
Aahana Kumra recounts early theatre days. (Photo: aahanakumra/Instagram)
Aahana Kumra recounts early theatre days. (Photo: aahanakumra/Instagram)
‘Lipstick Under My Burkha’ actress Aahana Kumra, despite attaining popular success in cinema and web entertainment, remains deeply attached to the stage and theatre acting…Ahana interacts with Siddhi Jain.
Sharing about her tryst with theatre and how was it like when she got on stage for the very first time, the 35-year-old actress told IANSlife: “I was very actively involved in theater in school, and I think I took to being on stage and I absolutely loved the idea of performing and constantly being on stage when I was like 10-11 or maybe younger. But my first professional tryst with theater was I think when I was 15, when I performed with Neeraj Kabi for a play called “Aham” and I was still in college at that time. It was pretty fantastic and it was the first time I performed at Prithvi Theatre.”
Calling Prithvi Theatre “a very special place” for her, she says she has “literally spent (her) formative years understanding performance and backstage and everything that requires understanding about theatre from Prithvi.”
Mumbai: Actress Aahana Kumra at the Lakme Fashion Week Winter/Festive 2019 in Mumbai on Aug 23, 2019. (Photo: IANS)
“It really has been school for me. It has been a school playground for me. It has been home for me. I remember, the first time I went to Prithvi House and I saw the Prithvi theater, I was just completely in love. It felt like a place out of the world, whether it was playing with puppets, or painting our faces and doing actions and speaking Shakespeare, all of that was just fantastic.
“It was something that I had never seen before, and I was never introduced to anything like this before. Prithvi also has this great attribute that it really takes you in, it makes you one of their own, so you become like one family with theater and that’s exactly what happened. And then I just, I think that for me, there was no turning back. I just continued doing the stage.”
Aahana says that she continues doing theatre and loves it.
“And I wish I can spend the rest of my life doing theatre and some fantastic work with some fantastic artistes,” she signs off.
Director Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri will showcase the dying arts of India, like folk theatre and qawwali in his upcoming film, The Last Show.
Agnihotri recently flew to Bhopal to begin the shoot of the film, with actors Anupam Kher and Satish Kaushik.
According to a source, some of the folk artistes of Bhopal met the director, who was shooting with Anupam Kher at the city’s Shaukat Mahal. The artistes dedicated a qawwali to the director. Agnihotri loved the performance and decided to do something about the revival of old and forgotten qawwali groups of Bhopal.
Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri. (File Photo: IANS)
” ‘The Last Show’ is a tribute to dying arts of India, like folk theatre and qawwali. I have worked hard to find these old artistes who are lost in oblivion and nobody cares about them,” said Agnihotri.
“You might not have heard of this qawwali group but they are masters of their art,” he added.
The film is being jointly produced by Anupam Kher, Rumi Jafry, Satish Kaushik and Agnihotri.
Remo D'souza had 'amazing, very safe shoot' with Geeta Kapur, Terence Lewis.
Remo D’Souza music video.
Filmmaker-choreographer Remo D’Souza was happy to return to a film set after the lockdown hiatus — that too to shoot a music video in Goa.
Remo and his team of dancers put on their dancing shoes for the video of “Log kya kahenge” last week, and he says the experience of shooting amid the new normal was “exhilarating”. The video features Remo with dancing stars Punit Pathak, Dharmesh Yelande, Rahul Shetty, Abhinav Shekhar, Salman Yusuff Khan and Sushant.
Remo D’souza had ‘amazing, very safe shoot’ with Geeta Kapur, Terence Lewis.
“It was exhilarating to return to a working set after a long time. The experience was a little different but the energy and enthusiasm to put on our dancing shoes for the camera again, following the pause in our work lives, was unmatched. Hope the audience enjoys the song as much as we enjoyed making it,” said Remo.
The song is written, sung and composed by Abhinav Shekhar.
According to the producer of the video, Mahesh Kukreja, all government-mandated protocols were in place during the shooting, including proper sanitisation, temperature check and a compulsory Covid-19 test for all crew members.
Remo also shot two other songs in Goa. While one video features Siddharth Gupta and Karishma Sharma, the second was filmed on Salman Yusuf and Shakti Mohan.
The shooting for first-time director Maqbool Khan's "Khaali Peeli" starring Ishaan Khatter and Ananya Panday has begun.
The shooting for first-time director Maqbool Khan’s “Khaali Peeli” starring Ishaan Khatter and Ananya Panday has begun.
The functional dose of Bollywood ‘entertainment’ you get is, not surprisingly, the sort that would seem fresh about four decades back. …writes Vinayak Chakravorty
Okay, we get the point. This is supposed to be brainless fun. What was that hackneyed line our filmwallahs love to parrot — about leaving your brains out and all that blah. But Bollywood often forgets even the brainless needs some amount of brains to create, in order to qualify as fun.
To say the film has a wafer-thin storyline would be an insult to the fact that wafers do have texture and taste. These days, when packaging and marketing has become all-important in the world of Bollywood commercialism (more so for star kids), perhaps a cohesive plot was never the priority.
Ishaan Khatter.
Perhaps the priority was to set up a ‘showcase’ and little else, to underline the fact that Ishaan Khatter and Ananya Panday can dance and romance, and do the comedy-melodrama-action drill, and look pretty while they are at it, too. Khaali Peeli does well to display that these two budding stars can be what Bollywood loves calling the ‘complete package’.
The functional dose of Bollywood ‘entertainment’ you get is, not surprisingly, the sort that would seem fresh about four decades back. Sample the boxes the film checks: There is no script. There is no logic. The casting of the hero and the heroine is hardly about whether they match their street smart characters. Rather, they have obviously been signed because they look like hero and heroine going by the old-school Bollywood book. They share a lot of the dishoom dose and some random naach-gaana between them. The bad guys think being bad is about swagger and snarl and, cut to basics, you know all along the hero is too smart for the villains.
Oh, there is a Mumbaiyya taxi in all this. A ‘kaali peeli’, as the yellow tops are known as in the city. The vehicle is integral to the action that goes on. So, as Ishaan Khatter and Ananya Panday get going with their khaali peeli antics kaali peeli in tow, the film gets a title!
Sima Agarwal and Yash Keswani’s script casts Ishaan as Blackie the cabbie. One night, he is out with his ‘kaali peeli’ even though there is a taxi strike in town. A chain of events sees Blackie get embroiled in a stabbing incident, so he decides to leave town for a while. Enter Pooja (Ananya Panday). She is on the run from Yusuf Chikna’s (Jaideep Ahlawat) brothel, and she has escaped with a fat load of cash and jewellery. Blackie realises the girl is loaded and quietly devises his get-rich-quick scheme at her expense.
Ananya Panday shares first look test pics of ‘Khaali Peeli’.
Of course there will be a catch, and it is about a back story involving them that is far from exciting.
The plot, or whatever you may call it, is about letting Ishaan and Ananya play the field through the duration of the narrative, which is one night. After a point, as one chase sequence follows another, the films starts getting tiresome. To make matters worse, there are the song-and-dance gigs thrown in between that only act to impede the flow of a story that is already weak.
Ishaan and Ananya clearly enjoy their all-out masala outing, almost oblivious to the cinematic mess they are thrown into. Despite the utterly formulaic spread, they look good as a ‘jodi’ — never mind that they struggle getting the Mumbaiyya lingo right. The film should help Ishaan particularly, to prove his worth as a complete Bollywood package, if that was the intention. Watch this one for the lead pair if you must, for there is little else to recommend.
Amol Parashar: Theatre easiest medium for exploration. (Photo: amolparashar/Instagram)
Amol Parashar: Theatre easiest medium for exploration. (Photo: amolparashar/Instagram)
Actor Amol Parashar, who rose to fame with his character Chitvan Sharma in TVF Tripling, and is currently being seen in film ‘Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare’, has also featured in the lead role in the televised play ‘Panchi Aise Aate Hai’ on Tata Sky Theatre, which is celebrating Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar’s contribution to theatre…Amol speaks with Siddhi Jain.
Sharing his thoughts on theatre, Amol shared that for exploration purposes, “theatre is the easiest and most convenient medium for an actor”.
“When working on a text, or when working on a theatrical production, the process gives you ample time and space to experiment and ‘play’ around. You can keep working on a performance or refining it as you do more and more shows of the same production. Thanks to the beauty of imagination in theatre, you can also deal with characters and themes that are far away from you physically. Film doesn’t offer you the same freedoms, at least not to the same extent,” he told IANSlife in an email.
Asked about theatre as a tool for social change and a mirror of society, Amol, 29, feels that theatre performance and watching is a much more personal experience. “You can dabble in unique and radical ideas and still find acceptance. The constraints of commerce don’t come in the way of theatre as much as they do with other forms of storytelling. That makes it a much more effective tool to drive through social change and new ideas.”
The young, promising actor also shared his perspective on Vijay Tendulkar’s contribution to Marathi theatre.
“Vijay Tendulkar is a legendary name and I am too small a fry to even have an opinion on his contribution. He had a voice of his own, and a strong one at that, taking up social and political events of his time and depicting them in his work. His plays are read, performed and analysed in a multiple languages in India and outside. There’s no doubt that he is one of the most influential playwrights of our country.”
Actor Amol Parashar. (File Photo: IANS)
Amol has dabbled in multiple mediums and genres, and says that it is a process to delve deeper into his craft and also himself as a human being. “I would like to be grow my skillset to a point where I should feel like nothing is unachievable.”
Finally, sharing his thoughts on theatre’s new televised avatar that he’s now featuring in, the actor shared that, “Every art form and medium goes through a process of evolution. With new technology at our disposal, it is our duty to experiment and see if we can come up with newer and newer ways to reach the audience. It is a great initiative by Tata Sky to this purpose, especially because classic texts and playwrights are being made accessible to a large audience. These texts would otherwise just become an archive in a library. It’s invigorating to see them being packaged in a certain way and made accessible to the large audience that Tata Sky enjoys.”
