Decoding a Bollywood icon: Cinema scholar Shoma A Chatterji launches her book on Amitabh Bachchan, alongside actor Prosenjit

An insightful and interesting new book on one of many giants of Indian cinema — Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan — was launched in Kolkata final night time by veteran cinema scholar and creator Dr Shoma A Chatterji, alongside celebrity Prosenjit Chatterjee.

The book, titled Amitabh Bachchan – As The Other, has its foreword written by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Founder-Director of the Film Heritage Foundation, who was current on the launch, held inside the Starmark bookstore at South City Mall. Sudeshna Roy, filmmaker and actor, launched the creator and the book to the viewers.

Chatterji, who’s an award-winning journalist and creator, learn out a letter dated March 5, 2024, that Bachchan Sr despatched as his participation within the book launch.

The letter was despatched by Amitabh Bachchan as a substitute of a video clip that the creator had earlier requested. It learn: “I commend your expertise and efforts, and am genuinely humbled… My finest needs for the debut of your book. May it obtain the acclaim and success it deserves. With finest needs, Amitabh Bachchan.”

Elaborating on what drove her to put in writing this book, Chatterji mentioned that she was 80 and Bachchan was 81, so this felt like the correct time to seize his life’s work via a book that is likely to be her personal final work.

Incidentally, Chatterji has a profession of almost 5 a long time related to cinema, and is a nationally acknowledged scholar of the movie business.

She additionally mentioned that she had devoted the book to Prosenjit, “with out informing him in any respect”, as a result of she believed that beneath all that stardust, he was a “very, superb [and] grounded human being”, a conclusion primarily based on 25 years of her friendship with the actor.

When he took the mic, Prosenjit mentioned that this book “[will] encourage a lot of actors and it’s going to encourage me additionally”. The actor, whose interview on his 40-year film career was recently published on Connected to India, mentioned that the topic of this book and its creator have been each “equally vital and skilled” — considered one of them was an impressive product of the movie business, and the opposite checked out cinema from the attitude of journalism.

Drawing a parallel between the careers of Amitabh Bachchan and Soumitra Chattopadhyay (aka Chatterjee), the legend of Bengali cinema who was a common in Satyajit Ray movies, Prosenjit mentioned that each of them had labored throughout mediums of mass leisure — radio, stage, display — and have been all the time among the many finest in what they did.

Books on their careers, for example a book like Amitabh Bachchan – As The Other, have been very important for understanding how they transitioned from one medium to a different, adapting to new applied sciences and remaining on the high of their recreation, mentioned the Bengali celebrity, who has himself been a a part of the landmark Hindi movie Shanghai and the acclaimed OTT sequence Jubilee.