Amitabh Bachchan has been talking to the media with a new-found candour and he has his reasons for doing so. But listen to him carefully and he sounds like a Superstar too anxious to be true.

He still lives from Friday to Friday, said Bachchan at the ‘Idea Exchange’ organised by The Indian Express. Yes, he could lend his celebrity to worthy causes, but he is fearful of opening himself to opposition from other points of view. Sure, he could have supported the small film movement in his heyday, but he was constantly worried: What if Prakash Mehra and Manmohan Desai didn’t cast him in their next? Now he is liberated from commercial pressures by factors outside his control — advancing age and the advent of the multiplex film. But no, he won’t do a Nishabd again — the Ram Gopal Varma film that courageously explores the sheer agony of an older man, played with great sensitivity by Bachchan, in a serious relationship with a much younger woman. Because the people have rejected it in the theatres and some have called him a “dirty old man”.

You don’t have to be an unrepentant Bachchan fan — as I am — to cringe. You don’t have to remember him as the quietly imploding Vijay of so many films to want him to get up from the couch with some of his aura intact.

Listening to Bachchan today is an unsettling feeling for yet another reason. Bachchan is telling us that he has always been watching us. It’s as if he is inverting the unspoken pact made between actor and audience in the dark of the theatre — we watch, he performs.

... contd.