Matinee Men (A Journey through Bollywood)

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Did you know that the horror movie Mahal (1949) grew out of an eerie experience actor Ashok Kumar had during an overnight stay at a resort?

That a nervous Yusuf Khan learnt of his screen name Dilip Kumar only from the promotions of his debut film.

Or that first-time Director Aditya Chopra had to fool Shah Rukh Khan into agreeing to a story narration by telling him that DDLJ (1995) was actually an action film!

An actor lives a hundred lives. He takes on the persona of a stranger and becomes him. He wakes up every morning, wears a different face and sets out to make the world his stage. And in this journey from real to reel, the man behind the screen idol often remains unknown, except to a chosen few. This book attempts to go beneath the pancake and the paint, beyond the glam and the glory, to bring to the reader the human behind the celluloid persona.

Peppered with anecdotes and candid interviews with some of the Indian cinema's most iconic stars, Matinee Men is an unmatched story of Bollywood as seen through the world of its greatest magicians, the stars.

Roshmila Bhattacharya is a senior journalist who in a career spanning three decades has worked in three leading media houses of the country-The Times of India, Hindustan Times and The Indian Express. For the last six years, she has been heading the entertainment section of Mumbai Mirror, a leading daily with The Times Group. In July 2019, she came out with her first book, Bad Man, the autobiography of Gulshan Grover.

Reaching for the Stars

As a child I wanted to fly, to where the stars twinkled. I imagined myself as an air hostess, soaring over the world, till one day, while sailing through the clouds, I discovered just how much work these 'aeroplane aunties' had to do. From serving meals and wheeling away leftovers to handing out blankets and repeatedly attending to call button requests, they were run off their feet. Not wanting to be sucked into this whirlpool of activity, I switched channels and instantly found myself a new hero in Captain Rakesh Sharma.

The first Indian to go into space, the captain spent 7 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes aboard the Salyut 7. When then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asked him how India looked from up there, he quipped, `Sare japan se achcha Hindustan Namara: I repeated the words to myself and imagined myself in a spaceship, once again reaching for the stars. Then, I discovered that astronomy is a branch of applied physics and so requires a sound knowledge of mathematics which has always been my Achilles' Heel. With a thud, I came down to earth.

Maybe I could be a typist, I told myself, having pruned my wings. But I decided against this career option at the end of the first class because the idea of banging on a typewriter all day long was terrifyingly tedious.