To add to those long comments the the KBC history of this seminal star (and seminal Indian.. I have always insisted on this idea that there are at the most 3-4 Indians more important to the popular imagination of the post-Independence nation-state than Amitabh Bachchan.. a sequence that includes the Mahatma or Bapu… the extraordinarily important Rabindranath or Gurudev as he was called by the latter.. and runs through Panditji and Babasaheb.. has Amitabh Bachchan as a fourth essential link.. I'd go even further.. once that generation of 'founding fathers' runs out it is precisely Amitabh Bachchan who is in a way Indian's 'Central Man'… but in any case it is precisely this 'idea' of India, especially that manifested by the last three that has been so much under threat in the last three decades though also one that is much more resilient than one might think, much more aligned to a blueprint of the nation's soul than might seem to be the case in partisan divides elsewhere..) is the latest manifestation of this long history and the most recent ads of the upcoming season highlight this point even more.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that great as one might think Amitabh Bachchan to be he is 'even' greater. I cannot stress this enough. This is not a thesis. It is about reading the signs of history and popular culture.

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