Latest news with #Hum
Hindustan Times
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Ram Kapoor addresses rumoured fallout with Ekta Kapoor: 'She can say whatever she wants to'
Actor Ram Kapoor and producer Ekta Kapoor have been making headlines lately due to their rumoured falling out, sparked by Ram's comments about the intimate scenes in Bade Achhe Lagte Hain. Now, Ram has finally addressed the buzz around the tension. Also read: 'Hum bade hi achche lagte hain': Did Ekta Kapoor take indirect dig at Ram Kapoor's Ozempic weight loss rumours? Ram opened up about the much-discussed fallout with producer Ekta Kapoor during an interview with NDTV. Ram chose not to fuel the fire, opting for silence instead of publicly discussing the rift with Ekta, and refrained from making any negative comments about her. Ram has worked with Ekta on shows such as Bade Achhe Lagte Hain and Kasamh Se. He said, 'She can say whatever she wants to, but I will not say a word. Because at the end of the day, she gave me what no one gave me. She believed in me when nobody else did. And for that, I will always be grateful. She has the right to say whatever she wants to about me till the end of my career.' The actor also addressed his wife Gautami's cryptic post, calling it a playful banter. Gautami had seemingly responded by taking a dig at Ekta's comments about Ram's weight loss. In the interview, Ram said, 'My wife knows where I stand. It was all in good cannot forget what someone has done for you.' The rift started when Ram suggested in an interview that Ekta had to deal with the aftermath of Bade Achhe Lagte Hain's romantic scenes. Ekta fired back on social media, saying, 'Unprofessional actors giving interviews about my shows should shut up. False information and skewed stories can only last till I talk. But there is dignity in silence'. In another apparent jibe at Ram's physical transformation, Ekta posted a video joking about weight loss and body image, referencing the show title: 'Hum bade hi acche lagte hain'. Ram, who has been in the news for his drastic weight loss, will next be seen in a detective show, Mistry. It will be out on JioHotstar on June 27. Produced by Banijay Asia in association with Universal International Studios and directed by Rishab Seth, Mistry is the Indian adaptation of the multi-award-winning US series Monk. The star cast includes Mona Singh as the fearless ACP Sehmat Siddiqui. Shikha Talsania, and Kshitish Date.
Indian Express
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Bollywood's most ‘haunted' shooting location was destroyed in fire, scared living daylights out of Amitabh Bachchan, Bipasha Basu: ‘They gave me holy water'
One of Bollywood's most popular shooting locations is also among the most 'haunted'. The infamous Mukesh Mills compound in Colaba was closed down for film shoots in 2019, with the BMC citing its structural integrity as the main reason behind the closure. But even before it became illegal to shoot there, film crews were apprehensive about working at Mukesh Mills, having heard numerous stories over the years. In an Instagram post six years ago, actor Ayushmann Khurrana wrote that he'd heard stories of the compound as well. 'Log yahan andhere ke baad shoot nahi karte (People don't shoot here after dark). They think it's haunted,' he wrote. According to a Conde Nast Traveller report, Mukesh Mills was established sometime in the late 1800s and the early 1990s by Muljibhai Madhvani, the Owner of East African Hardware Ltd, when hundreds of such mills were constructed around Mumbai. The famous Phoenix Mills in Lower Parel is now a mall. Mukesh Mills was constructed right by the sea in Colaba; it was the only mill in South Bombay. Years later, its prime location would make it a favourite for film shoots. It survived the Bombay Mill Workers' Strike of 1929 and World War II, before ultimately closing down in the year 2000. But it was abandoned many years earlier, when a fire destroyed the compound and killed several mill workers in 1982. Also read – Rajesh Khanna's 'cursed' sea-facing bungalow Aashirwad was said to be 'haunted' Since then, the song 'Jumma Chumma De De' from the 1991 film Hum was shot there, as was the 'Whistle Baja' song from Tiger Shroff and Kriti Sanon's debut movie, Heropanti. Mahesh Bhatt filmed a scene from the film Sadak, starring Pooja Bhatt and Sanjay Dutt. Amitabh Bachchan wrote a blog post about his experiences at the location, where he shot films such as Akayla, Khuda Gawah, Agneepath, and Hum. Recalling his memories of the 'Jumma Chumma' shoot, he wrote, 'The interiors look eerie. Time worn machinery still inhabits the large halls or 'galas'. Drums made to contain finished raw material scattered about in abandon, twisted and rusted iron metal ravaged perhaps by a fire forming a perfect setting for dark scary visuals through the lenses of accomplished camera men and the only signs of occupation coming from the painted to suit film sets across the walls and exteriors.' Read more – Imtiaz Ali spent nights in the 'darkest corners' of Madhubala's supposedly haunted bungalow, waiting for her ghost to come: 'I remember the feeling' Actor Bipasha Basu, who was supposed to film a scene for the film Footpath at Mukesh Mills, walked away with a terrifying experience. She recalled, 'I was shooting for Footpath at Mukesh Mills, in Mumbai. It's known to be spooky and there are many stories around it that the people in the film business keep talking about. It was during the day and I was supposed to shoot on the second floor of the premises. Generally, I don't forget my dialogues and I was alone in one room and there was this a very long track that was placed. Everyone else was in the other room, and each time I had to walk ahead and say the dialogue, it felt like something was stopping me.' Read more – Nargis Fakhri recalls living in a 'haunted' apartment in Mumbai, narrates chilling nightmare: 'Pale, scary guy would take me to the cemetery…' She continued, 'I knew my entire monologue by heart, yet, I kept forgetting the lines. This happened repeatedly, and that's when my director Vikram Bhatt asked my hair stylist, 'What is Bipasha feeling?' Eventually, we decided that we should get out of there. They got me out of the set, and they gave me some holy water and stuff like that. I slept in the vanity van for a while and then they called for pack-up. The next day, the crew did a pooja there, basically so that we could continue shooting, but even the pandit who did the pooja had an accident. So, after that, we didn't complete the scene there; we shot it at a different location. I have no explanation for it, but what happened at Mukesh Mills was a scary experience.' Also read – Geeta Dutt 'believed in ghosts', forced Guru Dutt to demolish their 'haunted' Pali Hill bungalow because she felt it was bringing misfortune Actor Kamya Panjabi had also 'heard stories' about Mukesh Mills over the years, but was sure that she'd be safe because she's 'a very religious person'. Even before the shoot began, she told India Forums in 2009, she lost her valuables and her new car broke down. But, on the day of the shoot, something terrifying happened. A girl who acts as one of the inmates in the mental asylum behaved like possessed. She suddenly had a manly voice, her face literally changed and those who were gathered there were taken aback. When I got to know of this, I wanted to see the girl; but stopped myself from going there. My director who went and saw the girl told me that the girl in a manly voice was screaming,'Yahan se chale jaao, yeh hamari jagah hai, maine mana kiya tha naa mat aana, chale jaoo''. Kamya was shaken up by the experience, and had no intention of continuing the shoot. But she persevered, and the crew ensured that they wrap things up early. 'I will never go back to that place again,' she said. Others who've spoken about having experienced spooky incidents at Mukesh Mills include Saqib Saleem and Riteish Deshmukh. The late paranormal investigator Gaurav Tiwari, who founded the Indian Paranormal Society, 'investigated' the location in 2014.
News18
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
'Meat, Alcohol, And 200 Cigarettes A Day': Amitabh Bachchan's Bold Confession From 1980 Interview
Last Updated: In a rare 1980 interview, Amitabh Bachchan revealed he once smoked 200 cigarettes daily, drank heavily, and ate meat—habits he later quit for a simpler, disciplined life Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood's living legend, widely admired today for his disciplined and modest lifestyle, once led a very different life. In a candid 1980 interview with India Today, the megastar opened up about his former habits, which included heavy smoking, regular alcohol consumption, and eating meat. 'I do not smoke, drink, or eat meat. It is not a religious issue, but a matter of taste," he said. 'I used to consume meat, drink alcohol, and smoke, but I have given all that up." His decision to quit was not motivated by religious beliefs but stemmed from practical challenges, especially the difficulty of finding vegetarian food while travelling abroad. Amitabh Bachchan also noted that dietary differences in his family were never a cause for conflict. His wife, Jaya Bachchan, and his mother, Teji, both enjoyed non-vegetarian food, while his father, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, was a lifelong vegetarian. He revealed that during his time in Calcutta, he smoked up to 200 cigarettes a day. 'Yes, 200," he admitted. 'But I quit after coming to Bombay. I drank excessively too, but some years ago, I realised I didn't need it." Amitabh Bachchan also shared in the interview, 'These habits no longer affect me, except when I'm shooting overseas, where finding vegetarian food can be quite a challenge." Beyond lifestyle changes, Amitabh Bachchan also spoke about his temperament, describing himself as generally calm but quick-tempered in his younger days. 'I don't think I'm a violent person, nor do I often lose my temper," he said, though he acknowledged getting into a few college fights. On cinematic violence, he remarked, 'It should be grand, and people accept it as such." Professionally, Amitabh Bachchan continues to stay active in cinema. He was last seen in the futuristic pan-India film Kalki 2898 AD (2024), and later appeared alongside Rajinikanth in Vettaiyan (2024), marking their first on-screen reunion since their 1991 hit Hum. First Published:
Elle
03-06-2025
- Health
- Elle
With ‘Hum,' Helen Phillips Embraces the ‘Vast Gray Area' of Modern Technology
Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. The dish rags were disconcerting. In the fall of 2019, author Helen Phillips had already accumulated a hundred-plus-page document's worth of anecdotes about AI and surveillance for a potential book she wanted to write, the book that would become last year's Hum, now out in paperback. But it wasn't until Phillips herself experienced the slow creep of data tracking that the concepts of her book started feeling routinely manifest. During one particular walk home from work, she'd realized she needed to buy new dish rags; she'd opened her computer shortly after, and there they were, advertised for her. 'Had I ever searched for them? I didn't remember,' Phillips tells me now. 'Had I said something aloud? It was just that weird feeling of being surveilled.' She went ahead and bought the dish rags, but the purchase didn't rid her of 'that little ick feeling,' that sense of being watched. 'What if you took that kind of consumer surveillance to an extreme place?' Phillips asks. That question ended up forming the central premise of Hum, a taut work of literary science-fiction that's as much about the insecurities of intimacy and parenthood as it is the expanding scope of technology. The story takes place in a climate-ravaged near-future world, in which Phillips's protagonist, May, loses her job to the proliferation of AI, a proliferation that has led to the increasing presence of robots nicknamed 'hums.' After undergoing an experimental surgery that prevents her face from being recognized by surveillance tech, May uses her earnings to take her husband and kids to the Botanical Garden, a lush and luxurious paradise protected from the climbing temperatures outside its fortress. But even a world inside an insulated bubble isn't always a legible one, and soon May has to depend on a hum to keep her family intact. Below, Phillips discusses how she tackled the big questions of technology, parenthood, and climate change in such a tight story; what working on Hum taught her about the future; and the common denominator amongst her books, including the 2019 National Book Award-longlisted The Need and 2015's The Beautiful Bureaucrat. The first line of the book came to me early on: 'The needle inched closer to her eye, and she tried not to flinch.' There's a bit of the anxiety of the future that we are facing right there in that line. May is interested in the possibility of not being recognizable in a city where surveillance is so common. She's also doing it for money because she has lost her job to artificial intelligence. That's what she has to sell at this point in her life: herself as a test subject. There's also a different answer to that question that's a little more personal. When I was 11 years old, I lost all of my hair due to alopecia. So I've been a bald woman for the vast majority of my life. And when I was about 13, my mom and I had the idea to get eyebrows and eyeliner tattooed on my face so that I wouldn't have to apply that in the morning. The process of having facial tattoos at that age—my sense memory of that is very present in [the book's] initial scene. So that was where the physical grounding of it came from. When I am setting out to write a novel, it is, in a large part, a way of processing my own anxieties—a way of understanding them better. I was assembling the things that I'm concerned about as I look to the future; there's a long laundry list of those. And as I was reading and thinking about this plot, they all coalesced. The original draft of the book was twice as long and had a lot more research in it. I cut the book basically in half, because what I want is [the research] to be the iceberg that you feel under the book, but not the focus point of the book. I certainly wanted to explore the vast gray area that I feel in my own life about technology. It is actually encouraging or reassuring that you can know where your children are at all times. But, is it also troubling that we surveil our children by way of their devices? And always know where they are? Is there some loss of essential human exploration and adventure that they lose when they know that we're tracking them? I'm concerned about that. The hums are an embodiment of that [dissonance]. My hope is that the reader experiences the hums in a lot of different ways and have a range of different feelings toward them: from finding them sinister to finding them comforting and cute. I think that's how technology is for us: It's nice that when I'm lost, I can find my way on my phone. I don't even know how I'd get around the world without it. But do I find it eerie that, in order for my phone to help me navigate a map, someone somewhere basically knows where I am at all times? It's such a double-edged sword; I wanted to get at that in the book. Since I began writing Hum, climate change has accelerated and artificial intelligence—when I was writing, it was GPT-3, not ChatGPT, which is a whole leap. So these problems have only become thornier since I began researching the book. But in the interviews I did as I was researching the book, I would ask people, 'What can we do?' And a refrain I heard was that we have to have community; we have to have meaningful communities. It's only from that sense of interconnectedness and collective action that we can hope to have change. The book doesn't really get to that collective action place, but I do intend that, at the end—at least in the unit of the family—there's some sense of an interconnected body of care and wellbeing. I do feel like The Beautiful Bureaucrat, The Need, and Hum are kind of in a series together. They all have female protagonists, and they're told in the close-third [point of view] with a real intimacy to that protagonist's anxiety and desire. They all have some element of speculation or science fiction that, for me, is reflecting back on the world we do live in. They also all have a very different element of scientific research. With The Beautiful Bureaucrat, I did a lot of mathematical research. With The Need, I did a lot of research about paleobotany because that was the profession of the protagonist. For this book, I did a lot of research about artificial intelligence and climate change. But they're speaking to each other in a deeper way, too. A reviewer recently said, 'Helen makes anxiety a genre,' which is maybe a dubious distinction. But I do think that—to some extent—these are books about confronting your anxieties. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Hindustan Times
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Shilpa Shirodkar recalls being labelled ‘panauti' after her first 2 films were shelved: ‘Whenever I signed a big film…'
Not every actor finds an easy path into the film industry, and Shilpa Shirodkar's early years in Bollywood were marked by setbacks and harsh labels. In an interview with Zoom, the actor, best known for her roles in Kishen Kanhaiya and Hum, spoke candidly about being labelled jinxed after two of her initial projects fell through before they could go on floors. (Also Read: Shilpa Shirodkar reveals looking for work before Bigg Boss 18: But people were not ready to even meet me) Shilpa recalled what was meant to be a dream launch in 1986 with filmmaker Sawan Kumar Tak's Sautan Ki Beti, which never saw the light. 'On the 9th of August, I did my Mahurat at Filmalaya Studios. It was one of the biggest launch pads. Sawan ji was making Sautan Ki Beti, and I was playing the title role. It couldn't have been bigger than that. But two years later, nothing had happened. Sawan ji said, 'I'm not making the film. If you get something from outside, take it,' she shared. Following that, her mother reached out to photographer Gautam Rajadhyaksha, who connected her with Boney Kapoor and Surinder Kapoor for a film. She said that Boney's father liked her and promised to cast her opposite Sanjay Kapoor in a film called Jungle. But they dropped that idea and decided to make Prem instead, and she didn't fit the role. That film also slipped out of her hands. Shilpa added that industry insiders began gossiping about her string of missed opportunities, following which a well-wisher approached Mithun Chakraborty. 'He said, 'Dada, this girl's two films have been shelved and now the industry is calling her all sorts of names—please launch her.' They said I was jinxed, a panauti. Whenever I signed a big film, it got shelved. But if you have strong family support, these things don't matter.' Eventually, Shilpa made her acting debut in Ramesh Sippy's Bhrashtachar in 1989, starring alongside Mithun Chakraborty and Rekha, where she portrayed a blind girl. The film earned her recognition, and she soon appeared in hits like Kishen Kanhaiya (1990), Trinetra (1991), and Hum (1991). Her filmography went on to include notable titles such as Khuda Gawah, Aankhen, Pehchaan, Gopi Kishan, Bewafa Sanam, and Mrityudand.
