Jai Arjun reads boring nonfiction so you don’t have to, reviewing Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me:

This isn’t a biography of Amitabh Bachchan… It’s a book about the author attempting to write such a book but… opting to write about herself instead…

She writes of him fixing her in a stare that’s “a cross between a monitor lizard and Paddington Bear”. Trying to make small talk with him when he’s broody and closed, she says, “is like trying to convince Mr. Kurtz to leave the jungle”…

There are also some cutting observations… such as this one about the failure of Silsila, based on AB’s real-life affair with Rekha:

Silsila was not a success. It was almost as if they had all decided to give the public what it appeared to want… But of course no one likes to be confronted with their own snoopy behaviour. It’s… embarrassing to be presented with someone’s underwear drawer and told it’s okay to rifle through it… [Link]

Naachgaana excerpts the book:

… there is much to revel in Hines’ account of a decade of chasing Bachchan, from Hyderabad to Bangkok, despite it having been watered down after his threats of suing her…

After I wrote the first dissertation on Amitabh, he happened to be in London again… When he had finished he pronounced that my basic thesis was totally wrong… ‘So you are not the personification of the promise of the phallus to India’s disenfranchised young urban males?’ I squeaked. ‘No!’ he smiled, ‘I am the phallus!’…

I even had the dubious honour of appearing in the Indian gossip columns, once as ‘Icy Spicy’, and another time as an ‘English Rose’…

One of my friends recently asked Amitabh what made him smell so goddamn good. He told us that he mixes his perfumes, having a different one for different parts of his body and a special one for his hands. This sounds foul but it works, in an Eastern Potentate kind of way. And being the most fragrant man on the planet goes with the whole Ming-the-Merciless-bling-is-my-thing look he has going on with gems the size of ice cubes all over his long, soft-looking fingers…

Amitabh once told me about his time in New York during a sabbatical at the start of the 1990s… he hadn’t liked the fact that he had been mugged a couple of times… ‘I recited speeches from my films as I walked along at night. People just thought I was insane so they stayed away!’ …

‘I have decided that the only person who is qualified to write my biography is … my mother.’ [Link]

Here’s another excerpt about the tussle over the first draft:

… I sent Amitabh a copy of the first draft of the book… ‘He went mental’… He would, I was informed in an email, fight me to the last drop of blood in his veins. A threat which… struck me as a little filmi… he was suddenly the Angry Young Man - Vijay in Trishul, to be exact. (Just my luck to get Vijay, the most extreme version, and not one of Amitabh’s more lovable characters, like Anthony Gonsalves from Amar Akbar Anthony)…

We watched Lost in Translation. Amitabh didn’t enjoy the film; didn’t really see the point. Ah, the irony. [Link]

The author gained some notoriety a few years ago:

Hines was in the news for allegedly having a child out of wedlock with actor Aamir Khan while she was in India four years ago… [Link]

Related post: Unspeakable