This actor who became Karna was offered role of Arjuna in Mahabharata, left role due to..., producer threw him out of office..., his name is...
The 1980s mythological epic series Mahabharat on Doordarshan included many prominent celebrities, including Mukesh Khanna as Bhishma and Nitish Bhardwaj as Lord Krishna, Roopa Ganguly as Draupadi and Puneet Issar as Duryodhana. But did you know that the actor who played role of legendary Karna was first offered the role of Arjuna but he refused it just because of his one stubborn condition. The Actor Who Refused To Play Arjun Due To His…
Here we are talking about actor Pankaj Dheer who gained huge popularity after playing the role in renowned late producer BR Chopra's cult series, but initially it was not planned for him to take the role of Karna. In a chat with Lehren Retro few years back, Pankaj shared, 'When I auditioned, the dialogue writers Rahi Masoom Raza, Bhring Tupkari sahab, and Pandit Narendra Sharma ji were all there. They felt I was a great fit for the role of Arjuna. We shook hands, and I signed the contract. Then BR Chopra called me up and said that I would also need to portray Brihannala , Arjuna's real form, which meant I had to shave off my moustache. I was like, 'No way, I can't do that.' I explained that my face just wouldn't look right without it. He replied, 'Are you an actor or not? You're turning down such a significant role over a moustache? I just don't get it.' When Pankaj Dheer Revealed That He Was…
Later, the actor shared an interesting anecdote from that incident. He mentioned that due to his circumstances, BR Chopra had initially kicked him out of the office. However, when he struggled to find the right actor for role of Surya and Kunti's son, he reached out to him again to play Karna in Mahabharat. 'Looking back, it was a foolish move on my part, but at that moment, I could only see things that way. Chopra sahab told me, 'Get out of this door and don't come back.' He literally threw me out of his office. My contract was ripped up, and for six months, I wandered around doing dubbing work. Then Chopra sir called me back, and I believe that was destiny at play. He asked if I could take on the role of Karna. I was curious and asked him, 'Sir, I don't have to shave off my moustache, right?' He assured me I wouldn't have to. It truly felt like fate that I ended up playing Karna'
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Time of India
17 hours ago
- Time of India
A cultural autopsy of the death of hobbies in India
Somewhere in the second half of the Kala Kendra's nritya-natakam on Karna's life, just after the scene where he donates his kavach and kundal to Indra, I caught myself zoning out. I was sitting in the Kamani Auditorium (Delhi), surrounded by rows of earnest culture aficionados, retirees, visibly bored schoolchildren, and those select few who were more absorbed in making reels than enjoying the performance. The stage glowed with molten amber, Karna's silhouette frozen in a moment of tragic generosity, the mridangam beating low, and the echoes of Manohar Singh's baritone voice-over still resonating. And yet, my mind drifted. A strange thought sneaked in: What on earth was I doing here? Not 'here' as in physically present (I can account for that), but 'here' as in still doing this. Still attending long, meandering theatre performances in a time of short-form everything. What am I trying to prove, or preserve? Is this hobby of mine, watching theatre, some quiet, performative nostalgia designed to feel slightly superior to the Netflix binge crowd (to which I too belong, incidentally)? Or just plain angst dressed up as a pretentious cultural flex? The doubt passed, as such thoughts do. The dancer moved again, and Karna's dilemma bled back into mine. Later, walking out into the golden haze of Mandi House, I realised that what I experienced was not just momentary self-doubt. It was a lingering suspicion that hobbies, of any kind, are quietly dying in India. And with them, something more intangible – our capacity for leisure without utility, and joy without transaction. Traditional Indian hobbies such as numismatics, philately, collecting old books and memorabilia, ham radio, amateur birdwatching, chalk art, painting, and classical music appreciation are increasingly the preserve of people stuck in a 'those were the days' time warp. The spaces they once occupied in middle-class life are now filled with the hypnotic glow of smartphones and the curated dopamine rush engendered by social media. This loss is deeper than mere rose-tinted nostalgia. Hobbies, at their best, anchor us to time. They reintroduce the value of patience and help cultivate deep attention. They also refine our aesthetic temperament, what the ancients used to call rasa-bodha. In essence, they are un-monetizable joys, for you cannot 'scale' a stamp collection or 'leverage' your knowledge of the difference between the Indian bulbul and Indian pitta. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for their fading away. For the post-liberalisation generations raised on the urgency of cracking competitive exams and continuously upgrading skill-sets, hobbies came to be seen as frivolous distractions unless they impressed the job interviewer or led to a CV boost. Parents, too, changed. Where once a child who practised the violin after school was indulged as 'creative', today he or she is nudged toward robotics classes or extra tuitions. This is the industrialisation of childhood. Time not monetised is wasted, and effort without an audience is vanity. Meanwhile, the idea of the hobby itself has been subtly co-opted by platforms. Reading is often reduced to performative lists on Goodreads. Even music, formerly a slow courtship between the listener and the raga, is now consumed through remixes of bhopali and malkauns. And to be honest, I have been guilty of this too. There was but a gentle rebellion in pursuing hobbies. They resisted the fallacy of outcomes. You did not indulge in amateur astronomy to become a better executive, nor did you read old editions of Reader's Digest to improve your CGPA. You did it because something in you stirred when you did that activity. But our modern, digital culture demands metrics: followers, shares, views, virality. Leisure, simply, has been devoured by hustle. The decline of hobbies is also intertwined with India's shrinking public commons. Parks are either decrepit or commercialised. Local libraries, once havens for readers, are in disrepair. Hobby clubs and societies – all staples of the genteel consensus which informed Indian middle-class society – are dwindling. In Delhi's Lodhi Garden or Bengaluru's Lalbagh, you will still find hobbyists gathering quietly, but their numbers pale in comparison to the influencers posing for curated photo shoots. The urban commons is now, simply, an arena for performance, a check-in location on Instagram. Hobbies allowed for the democratisation of expertise. You did not need elite credentials to cultivate knowledge in entomology, or to become a respected chronicler of the history of food. In fact, some of India's most respected niche historians and conservationists began not as professionals, but as hobbyists. For instance, the venerable Valmiki Thapar, who passed away recently, started tiger conservation as a hobby. All things considered, the picture is not entirely bleak. Reddit forums on Indian archaeology, niche podcasts on Indian theatre forms, and running clubs, are enabling young Indians to find communities beyond their physical geographies. But these are still fringe movements and not yet part of mainstream consciousness. What we need, perhaps, is a quiet cultural shift. One that re-legitimises leisure and restores dignity to doing something for its own sake. Schools must make time for unstructured exploration. Cities must nurture non-commercial public spaces. Parents must reimagine ambition. And we must not be rigid. Social media can be leveraged to spark a resurgence in hobbies by encouraging them to be archived and displayed. For instance, the act of performing a hobby can be shared and hashtagged to make it attractive to a larger populace. The hobbyist must become the content creator, but a conscientious one at that. Thus, we must work overtime to rescue the culture of hobbies from whatever it has devolved into. For if we lose it, we lose the invisible curriculum that taught us introspection and quietude. We lose spaces where class and ambition were momentarily suspended. Hobbies taught us to care. And in an India that is rapidly developing, noisy, and fast, such care is not an indulgence. It is a necessity. Author's plea: If you still practice a hobby, please do share more about it with a friend, family member, fellow hobbyist, or even a rank stranger. Not necessarily over social media, but perhaps over a cup of chai or filter coffee. This might seem unnecessary, but then does not the soul of a civilisation lie in its unnecessary acts? Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
New Indian Express
a day ago
- New Indian Express
The secret sauce behind success of Sinners and Parasite (and why Bollywood's too scared to try)
Think of yourself as a rich producer hearing a pitch for a film titled Rakshash Bhoomi. It is set in the 1990s rural Maharashtra, where Dalit twins, Bhima and Arjuna, ex-Mumbai gangsters, return home. They build Ambedkar Chetna Kendra – a cultural hub bursting with Ambedkarite activism during the day, and by night, turns into a musical hub with raw Bhim Rap spun by their cousin Ravidas. Their defiant music wakes a vampirish Rakshash who turns anyone he bites into his thralls. One harrowing night, the community battles both supernatural terror and human hatred. Bhima and Arjuna fight both types of demons and sacrifice themselves so Ravidas can survive, to tell the story of resistance. Would you give money to make this film? If you answer no, congratulations, you're fit to be a Bollywood producer. Because if this story were indeed pitched to a Bolly suit, he'd have politely muttered: 'too intellectual,' or worse: 'Make it cheap, it's got that OTT vibe,' without realising Rakshasha Bhoomi is nothing but my Dalit-history inspired rejigging of Ryan Coogler's global blockbuster Sinners where I've swapped Jim Crow American South for Maharashtra's caste battlegrounds, replacing vampires with Rakshashs feeding on prejudice. They'd have missed the point of one of the most delicious templates in cinema history, one that has not only made billions ($360 million plus for Sinners) but has also given films that have stood the test of time. This template of weaving intense truth into spectacle, layering social critique with visceral horror, thrill or action, began with a film that continues to inspire: Akira Kurosawa's High and Low. My first viewing of this 1963 masterpiece in 2007 left me speechless. A businessman agonises about paying ransom to a kidnapper who's mistakenly kidnapped his chauffeur's son, instead of his own. The kidnapper is caught after an edge-of-the-seat chase. Case closed, film over. Right? Nope! Not for Kurosawa, because here, as with his other films, he was merely using the mask of a thriller to hold up a synecdoche to the times, a lone crisis exposing the festering rot of post-war Japanese society. Though called High and Low in English, its original name, Tengoku to Jigoku, translates to Heaven and Hell. The businessman's hilltop mansion is heaven, while the sweltering, desperate slums below is hell. Though Kurosawa's genius blocking of actors (you don't even realise that the first half is in one house) and one colour scene in an entirely black and white film is talked about a lot, its real genius was its refusal to see life and people in black and white. The kidnapper wasn't a cartoonish villain whose vanquishing would quell your lust for justice. Nope! He was the product of that disparity, a living, breathing human affected by the hell he was living in. And the hero, my favourite actor Toshiro Mifune, has equally questionable morals but ultimately does the right thing, including going to the kidnapper to try and figure out 'why'. The film mirrored life's messy greys, a shock for someone like me who had grown up watching Bollywood's moral absolutes. Life is complicated. And cinema can also be complicated, like High and Low and the other Kurosawa gut-punch about the subjective nature of truth – Rashomon. Despite this, that film was such a good thriller that to date, it is referenced as one of the best police procedurals ever, having inspired and continued to inspire a whole host of cop films and series. Yet, while those inspirations only took the actual template of the film in a piecemeal way, those who did understand the full essence of what Kurosawa was trying to do with the film have given birth to their own modern masterpieces. One of the greatest proponents of that template is the modern master Boon Joon-ho. First with the Chris Evans starrer Snowpiercer, and most beautifully with Parasite, Joon-ho literally climbs Kurosawa's hill. Like Kurosawa takes two men – one on a hill, the other below it, Joon-ho takes two contrasting families – the wealthy Park family's sleek, sun-drenched home is contrasted with the Kims' damp, basement home, becoming a live wire of class warfare and buzzes with the same high voltage of High and Low. Ryan Coogler's Sinners scores an ace on this template, dividing itself, like Kurosawa's film, into two halves. The first immerses us in the oppressive reality of the 1930s Jim Crow South, the societal hell festering with racism and trauma. The second half is the vampire attack. Like Kurosawa, Coogler humanises his monsters; his vampires aren't mindless zombies but thinking, feeling, almost tragic parasites inheriting the memories and even artistry of the bodies they inhabit. What they refuse to inherit is the racism, the societal violence inside them. Nah! They prefer the biting kind of violence, one that turns humans into their kind, not the hack, shoot and burn of racists. Indeed, it is these monsters who warn the humans of an imminent attack, proving that, in a way, they are better than those heartless, racist monsters. This is the theme I have been struggling to use in crafting a film, where you shame humans by showing that monsters can be better than despicable humans. I found this in a Bhupen Hazarika song, 'Manuhe Manuhor Baabe' (Humans for humans' sake), whose most poignant line translates to: 'If humans do not become humane, monsters will never become so; And if demons do become humane, who should be ashamed then, brother.' Coogler manages that; the vampires in his films have more decency, more humanity than many 'humans' who judge people simply on the colour of their skin. This brings me to Bollywood's blindspot. People are stories. And India, with the world's largest population, naturally, has the most stories. And our epics? Oh, they are coloured in delicious shades of grey – Mahabharata is full of characters with dubious morals, and so is Ramayana – at least the versions before Ramcharitmanas. And living in this hellscape of a nation, that is both beautiful and grotesque at the same time, where the cost of life is so cheap that an easily fillable pothole in Asia's richest municipality and one of the world's richest cities, Mumbai, can kill me, how is it that we can't create our own High and Low, Sinners, or Parasite? Partly because Bollywood is stuck in escapism, but also because we often treat social realism and genre (horror, action, thriller, etc.) separately. We either get powerful social commentary in films like Do Bigha Zamin and Sairat or brainless fares like Dhamaal and the unending Housefull series. The idea that a brilliant critique of patriarchy, that is Stree, or an exposition of the horrors of greed, that is Tumbbad, can succeed, is seen as an exception, not a template. Coogler's Sinners or its bastardised version, Rakshash Bhoomi, would make producers squirm. Dalit/racism, plus horror, plus music – that's too niche, too intense, which can work only in OTT if made cheap according to them. They miss the point of a High and Low, Parasite and Sinners – spectacle mixed with substance as the recipe for blockbusters. Sinners ruled the box office because their layers resonated with people, not despite them. And what about the aficionados, the artsy makers? I know a lot of them. They mean well, and we have great discussions. But they, too, are married to their corner of the binary. They want to craft 'world cinema' but equate it with boring, staid stories where the narrative is like a pond's stagnant water, rather than a river's flowing torrent. Like Bollywood, they too see the success of films with substance as an exception and hence do not even consider crafting the chase of a High and Low, the thrill of a Sinners, the wicked satire of a Parasite. I suspect it is partly because they equate slow-moving stories to resistance against commercial fare. But a film doesn't have to be this or that. A film need not be an empty spectacle, or a sleepy, boring burn. The contrast of a High and Low could offer the antidote. This contrast frames societal divisions visually and structurally, like in Parasite and Sinners. Genre is a socially conscious filmmaker's Trojan horse – horror, thriller, action, sci-fi are the perfect vessels to smuggle in social critique (remember Get Out). And maybe splitting the halves like in High and Low and Sinners could work to have the distinct halves explore cause and effect, highs and lows. The world isn't simple. Our stories shouldn't be either. Morals, like people, are never black and white. Our films shouldn't be either. We have got to make films that bleed truth, not just blood. Audiences are hungry for more than popcorn; they crave meaning. Give it to them paced in a beat they can dance to, and a bite that leaves a mark. Not on the body. But on the conscience, on the soul.
Hans India
a day ago
- Hans India
Namaskaram to all Telugu cinema lovers, to people of all communities, and especially to my Brahmin friends...!
As someone who worked as the dialogue writer for the film Kannappa, it deeply pains me to witness the ongoing malicious propaganda surrounding the movie, particularly targeting its intentions and portrayal. I feel compelled to share a few thoughts from my heart. My name is Akella Siva Prasad, and I am a Brahmin. The film Kannappa was directed by Sri Mukesh Kumar Singh, who is also a Brahmin hailing from North India, a highly respected director known for his exceptional work on mythological television series such as Mahabharat. At no point in this film are Brahmins or people of any caste disrespected or shown in a negative light. If we look at past films based on the legend of Kannappa, such as Sri Kalahasti Mahatyam featuring Kannada legend Dr. Rajkumar, and Bhakta Kannappa starring Sri Krishnam Raju Garu — both depicted the temple priest, Mahadev Shastri (played by Sri Mudigonda Lingamurthy in the former and Sri Rao Gopal Rao in the latter), as someone who secretly gives the deity's ornaments to his concubine. In contrast, in the Kannappa film, Sri Vishnu Manchu Garu, who not only played the lead role but also contributed to the story, chose to elevate the character of Mahadev Shastri (played by Sri Mohan Babu Garu) as a noble and devout Shaivite, based on the 16th-century literary work Sri Kalahasti Mahatyam authored by Dhurtjati. Audiences will clearly understand this respectful portrayal after watching the film. Furthermore, not just during the writing phase but even after the film's completion, the makers showed the film to the chief priests of the sacred Sri Kalahasti temple, who deeply appreciated it and offered blessings with Vedic chants to both Sri Mohan Babu Garu and Sri Vishnu Garu. Also worth noting is that several Brahmins contributed to the film in various departments — including renowned lyricist Sri Ramajogayya Sastry Garu, who penned one of the songs. Let me emphasize — no one would spend crores of rupees, endure immense hardships, and go to such lengths to create a film just to disrespect any community. Lastly, Kannappa has not even been released yet. Those spreading baseless rumours and misinformation — may Lord Shiva himself deal with them.
