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.

Yet, take a step back and is it really a surprise that Bachchan reveals himself to be this hugely accomplished actor who would rather take an sms poll before he signs a film? A question follows. Who is he embarrassing more by his dissembling now: himself or us?

In a way, this is a question more specific to the celebrity of Amitabh Bachchan than any other. For all his uncommon talent, he has not been an artist at odds with his time, or in battle with it, like filmmaker-actors V. Shantaram and Guru Dutt, for instance. They went against the tide, kept making films that may not have been commercially successful, but in retrospect are deemed social and aesthetic landmarks. Or more recently Naseeruddin Shah, the man whose name Bachchan himself takes with undisguised respect and a certain yearning.

Bachchan was not ahead of his times either, like actors Moti Lal and Ashok Kumar, who brought a seemingly effortless ease to the screen that was completely unconventional in their own time. Then, in order to act you had to be seen to be doing so. These actors’ understated style flouted the dominant grammar of theatrical acting.

Instead, Amitabh Bachchan’s career has been built on his ability to second-guess the demand of his time, the immense talent he has brought to bear in pandering to it, and his marvelous flexibility in changing when his time changed.

What has made Amitabh Bachchan a “living legend” is not the potential he showed in the beginning of his career to break the mould. The gangly actor with the overlong legs and brooding eyes who joined the industry was such an unlikely chocolate-box hero. Be it Anand or Namak Haram, he could only play foil to the fairer and much-rouged Rajesh Khanna.

We the audiences wholeheartedly took to him, on the other hand, for the sheer intensity and charisma he then poured, in the years following Deewar, in becoming the mould itself. And later, in tweaking and twisting the mould to suit the needs of television and the multiplex.

He became the Angry Young Man when scriptwriters Salim-Javed tapped into the popular disillusion that had settled in with the refusal of the older feudal habits and structures to melt away in independent India. When the democratic System itself is corrupt and compromised, does the citizen have any recourse? In film after blockbuster film, Amitabh personified that question, until, despite the actor’s own unflagging enthusiasm, the act ran out of steam. Middle age had set in and coincidentally, the question itself was receding from the nation’s consciousness.

In less angry times, Amitabh Bachchan returned to the big screen as the hip patriarch who can also carry a film on his shoulders. For one generation, he could be the reassuring link between newer films and the older ones. For Gen Next, poised on the edge of vast social and cultural transitions, he provides yet another bridge: he’s the father and grandfather they can take to the disco.

When television weaned away big theatre audiences, he entered our drawing rooms as gracious host of a game show. When the multiplex changed the economics of filmmaking and the structure of storytelling, he became an assorted cast of characters, each one different from the other.

Perhaps we should have expected this then, this superstar who seems so conscious of our presence, sounds so nervous about what we might say. He is a celebrity of his time, no less, and tragically — given his rare talent — no more.