Aishwarya Sakhuja says it took her years to understand that her identity goes beyond her work. Looking back at her career, the actress, who has also worked in films, says both success and failure are temporary. Aishwarya, who has been actively doing TV, has also tried her luck in films.

“I have done four films, none of which were released. Thank God for that because I was terrible in them (smiles). I feel that it was my destiny to learn on a film set and then come on television and learn the workings of this medium,” she says.

The actress is now more confident about her abilities and does not shy away from acknowledging her growth. “Today, I tell my producers and whosoever I meet that I am a brilliant actor. I am not going to be modest because I worked hard to understand how this craft works,” she adds.

Aishwarya also opens up about how her height has affected her career. “My height has been a problem. It has been a problem for 16 years now. I have not found many tall leading men in this industry. It can get a little annoying at times, but I don’t blame anyone for that. I leave it to fate,” she shares.

She recalls that even during her wedding, her height became a consideration. “The only condition that my husband had was that throughout those three days of events I’d have to wear flats. He didn’t want anything else,” she says. Aishwarya admits she has also learnt not to measure herself by her professional identity.

“Our self-worth is all around the designation of the work that we do. That is a cultural problem that we have. It took me a lot of time to understand. But now that I have, I’ve understood that stardom is temporary and failures are also temporary. So why think so much? As long as I’m getting food, there’s a roof over my head, I don’t need anything else. I’m good,” she concludes.

Following the recent horrific incidents against women in Delhi and Bihar, women across the country have been raising their voices against concerns of their safety. Vijay Varma, who recently starred in Lust Stories 3, feels men need to get out of the way of women for them to be able to feel comfortable voicing their opinions and choices.

Vijay Varma says, "Men just need to get out of the way. That's been the problem, for them to think that they have a say in it. They should let women express what they want without judging them, mocking them, or making them feel inferior. I feel like the best service you can do as a man is to let women express themselves and learn from them and hear them out actually more than anything else."

The actor admits that the lack of teaching given to men on how to be more sensitive and less assertive, leads to this gap. “With men, usually nobody's really coaching or telling them what to do. The simple thing is that it starts at home, but there they are ‘my raja beta’ and that is a problem. So, say a girl is online talking about her period pain or whatever, you'll see a lot of boys comment on it. But you don't need to. Just get out of the way. It's not your world. It's not your issue and you don't understand it,” he says, reiterating, “I feel like the best service you can do as a man is to let women express themselves and learn from them and hear them out actually more than anything else.”

Meanwhile, at a recent event, Vijay was called the 'biggest red flag on screen' by the host, content creator Dolly Singh, as she referred to his grey shade roles in projects like Darlings, Dahaad, Pink, among others. The clip of the same incident surfaced on social media, with many pointing out that the actor appeared bothered by it.

Mention the label to him, and he says, "I just want a different colour, man. I'm sick of this red flag green flag." The actor adds that is the reason his character in Lust Stories 3 connected to him. "I like the guy because he just doesn't get any hint. I've played so many characters who get too many hints, so to play this guy who gets no hint was refreshing."

If not her songs, Neha Kakkar’s statements tend to break the internet. Her recent comments come amid a debate over the authenticity of singing reality shows, after Sunidhi Chauhan questioned how genuine the format remains and spoke about performances being edited or manipulated, as well as makers asking judges to promote specific contestants. Neha was also asked about Indian Idol’s dipping ratings and whether the show’s performance had been affected by her absence.

Neha says, “I found it very demeaning when I was asked about Indian Idol’s dipping ratings and whether it was scripted. I just said, ‘It’s not my fault if it’s not working. Main nahi kar rahi hoon toh nahi chal raha hai toh main kya karu? Main jab karti thi tab toh superhit hi tha.’ That’s what happened.”

The singer also weighs in on the use of contestants’ personal struggles and sob stories to influence audiences, arguing that such stories can help viewers understand the journeys behind the performers, as long as they do not overshadow talent.

Neha says, “Majority of people come from middle-class backgrounds, toh unke paas apni journey aur struggles ki stories hoti hain. They don’t own businesses or have the money to release singles or make their own videos, so they turn to platforms and people who can promote them aur unka saath de. If we bring their stories to the forefront, there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, people should know about the challenges they have faced and see how far they have come. Having said that, kabhi bhi talent se badi story toh nahi hoti hai. Talent is always the most important thing and should remain so.”

In the reality-show space, the Kala Chashma singer, who has judged singing reality shows such as Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Li’l Champs, the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th seasons of Indian Idol, and Superstar Singer - Season 3, is currently seen as a mentor on I-POPSTAR Vol 2. The show focuses on artistes who write and perform their own music, something she believes is particularly important for independent musicians.

She says, “Independent music has always been very important to me because I have built my career through it. When only a handful of music labels were operating, my brother Tony (Kakkar) and I started our own channel and began creating independent music, which did very well. But for other artistes, it was, and still is, difficult to get their music heard by an audience. That’s where I-POPSTAR comes into the picture. Unlike the other singing reality shows I have been part of, where contestants mostly sing covers, this is the only one where they write, compose and sing their own music. If they are good and their songs are great, no one can stop them from going viral.”

By 4 pm on Gandhi Jayanti, Mumbai’s Shivaji Park had become a cross-section of the city, with college students alongside senior citizens, Gen Z protesters alongside activists and families, and cultural veterans joining CJP’s protest seeking the CEC’s resignation. Among them were Bollywood names, including Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Vishal Bhardwaj, Rekha Bhardwaj, Hansal Mehta, Vishal Dadlani, Shashank Arora and activist Tushar Gandhi.

For some, showing up was simply about lending their support. “I don’t know whether anything has happened to anyone. I have come here only to extend my support,” said Vishal Bhardwaj, stressing that turning up was a personal choice.

“Whether Bollywood should also support this issue is an individual and personal matter. I am a part of Bollywood, but other people may feel that bigger stars should come forward. It is an individual choice. If someone feels that what is happening is wrong, they have come out in support. If they don’t feel that way, they may choose not to.”

This is a question of our democracy. It is a question of our rights. It is a question of our voice. We have been told since childhood to cast our votes, claim our rights, and raise our voices. But when our fundamental right is snatched away or manipulated, what is a person supposed to do? Naturally, they will protest, and this ‘people’s power’ is unstoppable now

Razia Sajjad Zaheer, Urdu writer and wife of the Marxist ideologue Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1973)—one of the founders of the Progressive Writers’ Association—had a delightful way of describing the progress of her four daughters. When her third daughter Nadira graduated from National School of Drama (NSD) with a gold medal in 1971, Razia celebrated it saying: “Jo dramebaaz thi woh NSD se paas huee (the one who would do drama passed out from the NSD).”

Interesting anecdotes like this animate ‘Ek Lamhaa Zindagi: A Love Story 1938-1979’, a play depicting the love between Razia and Sajjad Zaheer, the famous couple whose South Mumbai home hosted many memorable events, including the nikah of poet-lyricist Kaifi Azmi with Shaukat Kaifi.

This was one of the plays that Ekjute, Nadira Zaheer Babbar’s theatre group, staged last week at Prithvi Theatre as the group turned 45 this year. Founded in 1981, Ekjute (meaning together) has evolved into a major theatre movement. With dozens of plays, hundreds of performances and annual theatre workshops, it doesn’t just stage plays, it mentors actors.

“When Raj sahab (Raj Babbar, Nadira’s fellow NSD alumnus, whom she married in 1975) and I moved to Mumbai in the early 1980s, I knew that I wanted to create a platform for aspiring actors,” says Nadira, whose group has produced acclaimed plays like ‘Sandhya Chhaya’, ‘Look Back in Anger’, ‘Begum Jaan’ and ‘Sakku Bai’.

Theatre critic Shanta Gokhale says she enjoyed ‘Begum Jaan’, based on the life of a classical singer on hard times, where Nadira plays the protagonist. “Though I have not followed all her plays, she and her group certainly played a role in creating a vibrant theatre culture in the city,” says Gokhale.

A place that has shaped Ekjute’e journey is Prithvi Theatre. “I couldn’t have done so much had Jennifer and Shashi Kapoorji not opened their hearts, home and this place for me,” she says. It was here that she staged her first production ‘Yehudi Ki Ladki’, reviving the Parsi theatre style of storytelling. Years later, Nadira and Raj’s daughter Juhi Babbar Soni would make her stage debut with ‘Yehudi Ki Ladki’.

Juhi was one of many actors and directors — including the late Sushant Singh Rajput, Richa Chadda and Rakul Preet Singh — who trained at Ekjute’s theatre workshops. “I grew up with Ekjute, imbibing its vibrant literary and acting culture,” says Juhi, who co-directed the critically acclaimed ‘Ek Lamha Zindagi’ with actor-director Makrand Deshpande.

Deshpande admires the way Ekjute has evolved. “Nadiraji’s knowledge of Urdu enables her to give powerful performances in plays like ‘Begum Jaan’. Few theatre groups have survived 45 years. This alone is worth celebrating,” he adds.

Ashish Vidyarthi, who plays a small-town man dreaming of joining Bollywood, but ends up a clerk in ‘Dayashankar Ki Diary’ says, “This story has universal appeal. I have played this character for 25 years and every show excites me.”

Both Nadira and Juhi say they carry the rich legacy of Razia and Sajjad Zaheer. Zaheer and writer Mulk Raj Anand formed the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association in 1935, while at Oxford. A member of the Communist Party of India, Zaheer was sent to Lahore in 1948 to establish the CPI in Pakistan, but was arrested along with poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Razia moved mountains, and even sought Nehru’s support for her husband’s release.

This scene appears in ‘Ek Lamha...’ a play marking Ekjute’s 45th anniversary.

Rohit Roy’s recent remark on a podcast that television is a dustbin medium, you watch it today and will forget about it tomorrow, sparked a debate, drawing reactions from members of the industry as well as netizens. Rohit has now clarified that his comments were about the quality and nature of television content and were not intended to demean the medium or its actors.

In a conversation with us, Rohit says, “The word ‘dustbin’ obviously didn’t sit well with a lot of people, and they have every right to air their opinions. But I do wish they had gone through the entire interview and not reacted just to a clickbait line. Having said that, in retrospect, I should have used a better word. The choice of the word was definitely wrong. It was insensitive, and I shouldn’t have used it.”

Rohit explains that his larger point was about the kind of content television actors have been doing for years. “I was talking about what all of us TV actors have to go through because we are getting the same kind of work to do over the last few years. A lot of people who have been associated with television have spoken about it. This is the first time I’ve spoken about it, but the fact of the matter is that the content is definitely not getting better. Reality shows are coming in, big shows are happening, money is pouring in, but if I compare it to the kind of work we used to do on television 15 years ago, you don’t see shows like those anymore. That’s all I was saying. I intended to talk about the need for better content.”

Addressing the criticism over his comments about film actors being more graceful, he says it was a general statement. “The one thing we should realise is that I am a television actor first, who moved to OTT and cinema. Whatever I am today is because of Swabhimaan. My brother and I both started our careers with TV. How can I deride an entire industry? I was trying to say something for the betterment of an industry. I stand by my thought that we need to make better content on TV. ”

He adds, “Whatever I say are my personal opinions and people have a right to comment on them. But they should know that I wasn’t targeting anybody.”

On the work front, Rohit says he continues to be open to television and is in discussions for projects. “I have been meeting a lot of people to do work on TV. I want to do something that I enjoy going to work for. It has been like this throughout my career. I have done work that I have enjoyed, and that makes me want to wake up in the morning and rush to the set. I won’t do television just for the sake of doing it. So hopefully, something good works out soon.”

The actor also responds to those who have made personal comments about him following the controversy.

“I am not reacting to anybody. They all have a right to say things, just as I have a right to say things. But to a few actors who have got personal, I would say I didn’t attack anybody personally. When you say things like ‘Botox must have gone to his brain’ or ‘He has forgotten what television has given him’, you are personally attacking me. I didn’t take anybody’s name. I meant it in good faith, as a collective unit, and for the betterment of the industry that has given me everything.”

In an age where visibility, algorithms and constant access have become integral to stardom, John Abraham remains one of Bollywood’s more private actors. He tells us how protecting that space has never felt particularly difficult.

“I actually don’t find it difficult. I’ve always believed that not everything needs to be shared. Some things become more valuable when they remain personal,” he says. While he understands why visibility has become central to the way celebrities operate today, the Force actor says he has never felt compelled to change his approach.

“The world has changed, and I completely understand why many people choose to be more visible today. But I’ve never felt pressured to do something simply because the ecosystem demands it. At the end of the day, I want people to engage with my work. If they connect with my films, that’s enough for me,” he explains.

In an earlier interview with us John also spoke about not going against the grain in the industry. Whether it was taking on grey characters early on in his career, staying away from the party circuit or maintaining a relatively restrained presence on social media, the Satyameva Jayate actor said his choices were never part of a carefully constructed effort to appear unconventional.

“I don’t know if I’d call it a conscious choice. It’s just who I’ve always been. I’ve never had a strategy to be different or going against the grain. I’ve simply tried to make choices that felt authentic to me at that particular point in my life and career. The truth is, trends change every few years. What’s considered the right thing to do today may be completely different tomorrow. If you keep chasing that, it can get exhausting,” he said.

The recent Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) proposal to raise the tax on films per show is likely to marginally increase ticket prices in the Maximum City, as the new entertainment levy impacts revenues shared between exhibitors and distributors.

Mumbai, which has high penetration of multiplexes and single-screens and has significantly higher Average Ticket Price (ATP) relative to the national mean, contributes 20-25% to India’s gross box office collections.

Recently, the BMC proposed to increase the entertainment tax on per film show—not per ticket—of exhibitors to Rs400 from existing Rs60, amounting to a jump of nearly seven times.

This new entertainment tax on shows is likely to reduce box office revenue collection available and consequently, exhibitors estimate the average per ticket price may increase in the range of Rs 5-10, exhibitors and producers told ET.

Concerns loom over a possibility of a ripple effect of the tax to other territories in India amid what exhibitors claim to be a rather tepid business environment.

“The new BMC tax proposal defeats the purpose of a one nation-one tax policy framework. It has come at a time when the business in India’s exhibition industry has not comprehensively surpassed pre-Covid levels,” said Devang Sampat, managing director, Cinepolis India.

A key aspect in the proposed entertainment tax is that the levy is on shows and not on tickets, pointed out producers. But it will impact the box office revenues available for sharing between exhibitors and distributors after deducting the taxes, they said. “This is a fixed tax per show regardless of how many tickets are sold by exhibitors,” said Suniel Wadhwa, co-founder, Karmic Films. “But a higher tax on per show reduces the collection available for sharing between exhibitors and distributors.”

Film trade analysts said that occupancy in theatres will be an important variable which will impact the tax costs for exhibitors. Lower the occupancy higher will be the tax costs incurred, thereby reducing box office revenue available for sharing. “The new proposed tax is tightly linked to occupancy. This is because the tax is on shows and not on tickets,” said Girish Wankhede, a movie trade analyst.

On average, exhibitors estimate the average ticket price in Mumbai may go up in the range of Rs5-10 once the proposed tax is implemented. “Without getting into granular details, the hike of Rs340 entertainment tax per show will be passed on to consumers. This may lead to an increase of Rs 5-10 per ticket," said an exhibitor, requesting anonymity.

Midway through our conversation about restoring Pakeezah, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s phone rang. “Mr [Amitabh] Bachchan is calling me,” he said, stepping away for a moment, for Bachchan to compliment him. It was a small, fitting reminder of how much Kamal Amrohi’s 1972 classic still means to people, more than 50 years on.

For Dungarpur, this one was personal. He grew up watching Pakeezah — his grandmother loved it — and had wanted to restore it for years. That finally became possible after he met Amrohi’s children, Tajdar and Rukhsar, and, through their son Bilal, convinced the family to let him take it on. Nearly two years later, he calls it one of the most fulfilling restorations of his career.

The first roadblock was simple but severe: there was no original camera negative. What survived was third-generation material — copies of copies, each one having bled away detail. “The original camera negative is the most important, it’s called the mother for that reason,” Dungarpur explains.

“It’s the material that came directly out of the camera.” He compares it to the difference between a high-resolution photo and a version that’s been screenshotted and reshared a dozen times over. “If you have the source, you have the origin.”

With nothing but degraded copies to work from, the team went almost frame by frame, pulling out whatever information they could. He’d faced a similar problem restoring Sholay (1975) — but Pakeezah’s tangled colour history made this one harder still.

Pakeezah actually began life as a black-and-white film before the switch to colour, eventually shot on Eastman Kodak stock in CinemaScope. But decades on, the surviving prints couldn’t be trusted to show what those colours actually were. The clearest case was Meena Kumari’s costume in Inhi Logon — the prints had faded so badly that nobody could agree what shade it was even supposed to be.

Rather than guess, the team went back to old photographs and worked with the Amrohi family to match the dress to its real, original tones. For Dungarpur, that’s the heart of restoration: not repainting a film in whatever colours look good now, but doing the research to get back to what audiences actually saw on release.

Part of what makes Pakeezah so tricky is that it didn’t get made in one continuous stretch — the production dragged on for roughly 14 years. It started in black and white, including the earliest version of Inhi Logon, before shifting to colour partway through. The delay even reshaped the cast: Ashok Kumar, originally attached to the film, had aged out of his part by the time shooting resumed, and Raj Kumar stepped in as the lead. Restoring the film meant preserving something that had physically passed through several different eras of Indian cinema before it ever reached a screen — which is part of why Dungarpur sees it as a film that shaped generations after it, from Sanjay Leela Bhansali onward.

For Dungarpur, restoration isn’t about making an old film look new. It’s about keeping what made the film feel the way it did — grain included. “Grain is like the bloodstream in your body,” he says. Strip it all out chasing a spotless digital image, and you lose something essential. That matters more now that audiences are used to the over-sharpened look of streaming platforms. “What does your eye see when you open your eyes, and what does your Amazon or Netflix show you? What they show isn’t what you actually see. There’s a difference.”

Celluloid, he says, came closer to how the eye naturally perceives things — so the goal with Pakeezah wasn’t to make it look freshly shot today, but to bring back its lost detail and colour  while keeping its original texture intact.

That same philosophy shapes how Dungarpur thinks about AI in restoration. He doesn’t dismiss it outright, but he’s wary of calling something “restoration” when it’s really recreation.

His analogy: if a piece of the Taj Mahal’s original marble falls off, the instinct should be to track down the real marble first — not swap in a nicer-looking replacement just because it’s available. “There are shops outside selling even better marble than that. We could do that too. It won’t match.”

If the original element still exists, he says, use it. If it’s truly gone, AI might have a role to play — but the line between restoring and recreating has to stay clear. “There’s a lot of manual work in film preservation right now. Maybe AI evolves into something more. Whether that makes things better, we’ll have to see.”

He points to the runaway success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — shot on celluloid, no digital effects, no AI — as evidence people haven’t lost their appetite for the real thing. He sees the same pull in how audiences are responding to restored classics like Sholay at Film Heritage Foundation screenings. “There must be a reason people want to connect back to their roots.”

The restored 4K version of the 1972 classic Pakeezah is set to have its world première at the Festival Lumière in Lyon, France, in October, followed by a screening at the BFI London Film Festival in the United Kingdom.

Pakeezah’s original camera negative — the closest surviving source to what was filmed — was unavailable for the restoration. Dungarpur’s team had to work with much poorer, third-generation material.

The surviving prints had faded so severely that the colour of Meena Kumari’s costume in “Inhi Logon” was difficult to establish. The team referred to photographs and consulted the Amrohi family to recreate the original colour tones.