My Rajesh Khanna
By Asad Zaidi (Asad Zaidi's note on the superstar is so insightful that I could not resist the temptation to steal it from facebook and post it here.) One often forgets the political backdrop to important changes in popular culture and trends in mass entertainment media. The fading of Rajesh Khanna as a superstar in the mid-1970s and the remarkable rise of Amitabh Bachchan as the new hero ran parallel to the rise of Sanjay Gandhi in Indian politics. The romantic-idealist and often vulnerable screen persona of Rajesh Khanna didn't fit in the emerging new India of पाँच सूत्री कार्यक्रम (5-Point Programme). It is said that the real social engineers of Bombay cinema in that era, the loutish duo of script and dialogue writers Salim-Javed, had offered an 'image makeover' to Rajesh Khanna but he wasn't interested. Amitabh Bachchan then famously underwent the 'transformation' to become the proto-fascist 'angry young man' of...