Tarun Tejpal - Rejection. Reinvention. Resilience. Amitabh Bachchan’s storied life has it all

1
REJECTION. REINVENTION. RESILIENCE. AMITABH
BACHCHANS STORIED LIFE HAS IT ALL
2
In an in-depth interview to tarun tejpal a few
years ago, the actor reckoned with failure as
much as success The towering giant of Bollywood
Amitabh Bachchan turns 79 this October, of
which over five decades half a century are
marked by almost ungraspable fame. But fame is
an inadequate word for what Bachchan has earned
in these decades he has known adulation,
worship, power, privilege, reverence being
treated, in the literal sense, like a god, with
idols of his image being prayed to he has become
a multi-generational North Star, the unspoken
centre of the cinema industry whether he actively
participates in it any longer or not.
3
It is, however, not all that he has accomplished,
that might be his most extraordinary feat it is
all that he has bucked, all that he has survived,
all the near-misses and almost-failures that he
has overcome that are equally extraordinary. He
bucked death itself on the sets of Coolie exactly
40 years ago, exactly halfway through his life
thus far, given he will be 80 next year an
accident that brought the full force of
Bachchanmania into public view as the country
went into a paroxysm of grief, shock and disarray
at the prospect of losing one of the few humans
to transcend into its pantheon of gods. It
was on September 24, almost two months after the
accident, when he returned home and a nation
released its collective breath even today,
social media floods the actor with wishes on
August 2, the date of the accident, marking it as
his other birthday, the day he was born
again.
4
He bucked failure, early on in his career but
more jaw droppingly, once more at the age of 58
when debt, the utter absence of acting work and
the collapse of his entrepreneurial ventures put
him into the disorienting position of being a
hero, a legend, an icon, a superstar who could
inspire people to touch his feet but also had
bankruptcy looming. A god with nothing, it
seemed, left to give. And in 2000, he bucked the
fabled curse of television when he finally found
work that could help pull him out of the morass
of financial debt and decided to accept the role
of game-show host at Kaun Banega Crorepati. In
an interview with journalist Vir Sanghvi, he
recounted the circumstances that brought him
there. At the peak of his career, he said,
someone from his family advised him not to work
further and take a rest, which ended up as the
worst phase of his life.
5
Writing of that time on his blog, he says "In
the year 2000 when the world was celebrating a
new century, I was celebrating my disastrous
fortune. There were no films, no money, no
company, and a million legal cases. This time,
when told KBC was a huge risk youre shrinking
yourself from 70 mm to a 25-inch screen, friends
warned he decided he had nothing to lose and
followed his gut. The rest, as we know, is not
merely Bachchan history but television history in
this country. He bucked other, previous failures
too failures so surreal they almost seem like
fiction. After I graduated, someone suggested I
become a newsreader so I applied to All India
Radio. And I was rejected. I tried in Hindi, too,
and was rejected there too, he told tarun j
tejpal in an interview at THiNK in 2013.
6
Stop to think about this. Arguably the most
famous Indian voice in history possibly among
the most flawless dictions in Indian public life,
was rejected from an audio medium. It didnt
stop there. I saw an advertisement in a film
magazine for interviews to become an actor, put
out by a group of the leading directors of the
time, and thought it was the most legitimate way
to kick off an acting career. I didnt know any
other way. So I went, but I was rejected right
there in the preliminaries for that too, he told
tarun tejpal.
7
Resilience seems to be in his genes. In response
to a question from tarun j tejpal about his
parents in the same interview, he said My
parents was possibly the first ever inter caste
marriage in Allahabad and it caused an uproar.
They became virtual social outcasts. Doing the
unthinkable. Surviving the unsurvivable.
Achieving the unachievable. The Bachchan DNA
clearly is the stuff of legend.