Eventually, our needs, film stars or not, are almost always, basic and simple

What makes you truly happy? – We put that question to our film stars this month and you’ll read their responses inside – Kids, pets, friends, lovers, music, monsoons, moms, books, smiles…Eventually, we all breathe the same air. Eventually, our needs, fi lm stars or not, are almost always, basic and simple.

In the course of my 25 years in this profession, I have so often been pushed and prodded to answer all kinds of questions about fi lm stars. We tend to imagine fi lm stars live on a different planet – that they are exempted from all those small day to day things that make a common man’s life, that they have different emotional needs, or maybe that they have no emotional needs at all! We imagine that all that fame and fortune makes their hearts beat differently, that they live in a world run by a different, more benevolent god.

Amitabh Bachchan had once told me in an interview a long time ago, that an actor’s job makes him even more fragile and vulnerable because he is constantly drawing out emotions from within to put them in a character, which could leave him empty and drained or incapable of reacting emotionally to real life situations. All the more reason perhaps why they would protect and hang on to their emotional zones so fi ercely. And let’s face it, whether they require it or not, compassion and concern is not something that will come very easily their way. Even among their own family and friends, I have seen them be the constant benefactor, obliged to be the sole provider of not only good life but good cheer and good behaviour. Obliged to succumb to unreasonable demands from their siblings and spouses...compensating, forever, for being perceivably the more fortunate member of the family…and forever short-changing one self emotionally...

I have seen actresses letting their siblings walk all over them out of some strange sense of guilt. I’ve seen parents use their famous sons and daughters to fulfil their own desperate dreams. I’ve seen married actors walk onto their sets without breakfast or in the same crumpled clothes as the previous day because there’s no one at home to look into these mundane matters so early in the morning. I’ve seen so many of them subjected to the inverted snobbery syndrome within their own immediate environments.

Words of a famous actor to an actress friend: “There are very few people in my life whom I can take for granted, who I know are there and will be there for me always even if I don’t meet them, don’t speak to them for months, if I don’t ever do anything for them…people who need and expect nothing from me…please don’t take that away from me…I need to know you’re there even if only to take you for granted…”

That was in 1996. They are still friends even though their worlds are completely apart now and they hardly ever meet.