“We as a family are still haunted by the grave depression and the virtual bankruptcy we have experienced in our lifetime. We believe in continuing to work. We are afraid, what if those days are upon us again?” he said during an interaction with Express employees at Express Towers in Mumbai.

Bachchan spoke frankly about the time his company, ABCL, nearly went bust, and instead of declaring it bankrupt, “and not being able to face the friends in the fraternity I owed money to”, he decided to battle it out. “Now all my earnings, from TV, films and promotions, go to ABCL, and we are finally in the black. It was after eight years that I was able to announce a dividend at this year’s AGM,” he said.

Bachchan spoke on a wide range of topics, including acting, the dilemmas and pressures of being in the public eye, as well as his fear of getting into “controversial causes”.

“I admire people like Naseeruddin Shah or Shabana Azmi who stand up for the sake of the art they believe in, and the causes they stand for,” Bachchan said. “But I am not that sort of a person. Yes, I do think I should stand up for causes I believe in, but I fear sometimes that as I am an artist first, my attempts to associate myself with causes must not be misconstrued and misinterpreted... I have, therefore, stuck to things like polio, AIDS and global warming.”

Earlier this week, speaking to this newspaper in an interview, he had also spoken of his tryst with politics.

Commenting upon the charges levelled at him, he said: “It is not as if ringing 10 Janpath would mean an end to any Income-Tax matter... or any other such accusation. Look at the allegations hurled at me with regard to Bofors in 1987. That was when Rajiv Gandhi, my friend, was the Prime Minister. So these things make no difference.... In all the cases and legal matters coming up, I will do three things —- follow the law of the land, my conscience and do what is morally right.”

Recounting his family’s once very close ties with the Congress party, particularly the Gandhi Parivar, Bachchan surprisingly spoke without the bitterness that has come to characterise the ties between them.

“I have the fondest memories of Rajiv Gandhi, and it will always be like that,” he said. “Sarojini Naidu introduced my father to Pandit Nehru and Gandhi. My mother was an outsider to Allahabad, a young Sikh girl married into the city, her clothes and style were different. These were admired and the subject of much interest then... people used to talk about it. Mrs Indira Gandhi was very close to her.... I very much value my relationship with the family, and I don’t want to talk about why things went wrong, as it is too personal. But yes, whenever our children meet, they do chat. I didn’t invite them to Abhishek and Aishwarya’s wedding as we wanted to keep it small.”

Bachchan also talked about his controversial land purchase in Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh (now a court case), where he is accused of declaring himself a farmer. Referring to this and the I-T case against him, Bachchan said he didn’t feel he was being targeted by the UPA regime. “There is the law, and everybody has to be in accordance with it, and that includes me. This is something (SP leader) Amar Singhji has taught me.”

The actor said he saw nothing wrong in the company he kept, especially in the context of the Uttar Pradesh elections, or in the advertisements he did praising the Samajwadi Party regime. “This was not a mistake. I did it because we are friends. The ads had to be sponsored by the party... why should public money be spent on it? Take the UP Development Council. I was not the only member on it....”

When asked if being a public figure of his reputation, he could have read the writing on the wall and realised that his UP advertisements were not going down well, he said: “It is not for me to make estimates of how people would read my appearance in those ads.... All that I said in those ads were figures on crime published by a ministry in the Central Government. I did not invent the numbers.”

He said he was available for even the state of Maharashtra if it chose to use him to promote itself. “Even the new government in UP can use the ads now, if it wants. They are still valid,” Bachchan said.