10 things I hate about Amitabh Bachchan

1. Paa.

2. What he did in and to 80s cinema. With Deewar in the mid-70s, the Angry Young Man was born.  He made for a morally ambivalent iconoclast, layers of complexity behind the sullen, taciturn exterior. By the end of the 80s, this angry young man was a tired old pastiche of himself.

3. Each of his comic portrayals of drunkenness.

4. Abhishek Bachchan. Need I say more?

5. Apparently more is needed, so here it is, Aishwariya Rai Bachchan.

6. The airbrushed, stage-managed megalomaniacal Bachchan dynasty, the ongoing reverie of some relentless PR machine. Here is a collection of closely supervised robots reading off a script and presenting an image of familial unity as sterile as it is implausible.

7. The fact that with the possible exception of hemorrhoid cream, there is not a single product that one can legally retail that Bachchan has failed to endorse in recent years. Yes, he’s a cast iron legend and no one can take that away from him, but oh my, he’s making a concerted effort.

8. British Raj period romance Mard. Surely someone owes humanity at large an apology for that?

9. He’s a terrible ham, and has been for years.

10. He can act, and so well. He possesses a truly rare screen presence and, when he bothers, exceptional comic timing and that he is, if one can think back that far (to Abhimaan, for example), capable of subtle, nuanced, restrained performances. And that with all this going for him, he chose instead to become a dancing bear.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 15^th, 2010.