Superstar Shah Rukh Khan has penned the foreword for well-known film critic and author Anupama Chopra's new book First Day First Show. She feels only SRK could do justice because he has had an exemplary journey in the industry.
"I asked him to write the foreword because he is somebody whose career I have followed very closely and who in a sense to me is one who actually exemplified the journey. The three Khans have really spearheaded Bollywood. So for me he was the best person to encapsulate how much things have changed," Chopra said in an interview.
Giving a sneak preview of the book, Chopra said, "It's the collection of the work that I have done. The idea was to put the articles together so that it shows how much Bollywood has evolved in the last 20 years. It sort of becomes the history of modern Bollywood. It's to see where we were in 1993 and now it seems like another world."
She has been working for two decades, so how did she manage to retrieve her work to compile the book?
"Honestly, I am not so diligent. I completely relied on India Today, where I worked for about 12 years. Fortunately, for me, they have a great library, great archive so they took out all for me otherwise I would have been in a deep trouble."
Chopra, who won national award in 2001 for the best book on cinema for Sholay: The Making of a Classic, says revisiting her work was a nostalgic experience.
Mesmerized by Shah Rukh's success, Chopra had written his biography King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the seductive world of Indian cinema.
"It was amazing to go back and revisit the articles you have done 15 or 16 years ago. There was a profile I did of Shah Rukh in 1992 and 1995 when he was shooting for Aziz Mirza's Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman and Ram Jaane. It was extremely nostalgic to re-visit that time. But it was great fun," said the 48-year-old journalist.
Chopra, who has a strong connection with Bollywood, being the wife of producer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, shares a very professional relationship with the industry.
"My relationship with the film fraternity, apart from my husband, of course, is very professional. It's not that I am close friend with anyone. So I can tell you with all honesty that I have never been a case of being biased," she said.
Asked about her husband's take on the book, she said, "He doesn't read what I do. He reads some of it. He kills some of it. He prefers to read in Hindi. So he is not a big reader of my work."
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