The director-producer advices the actor on his 27th birthday to learn how to be macho from his father, Jackie Shroff, and not pose like his Rangeela heroine
Natasha Coutinho (MUMBAI MIRROR; March 4, 2017)

On Thursday night at around 8.28 pm, Ram Gopal Varma decided to wish Tiger Shroff on his 27th birthday. You could ask, what’s new given that 400-odd fans had turned up on his sets with a life-size card carrying messages from Tigerians across the world? Well, the director-producer’s series of tweets, which he posted over an hour-and-a-half with the last at 10.05 am, was for heckling rather than star-gazing.

The tweets mocked the actor, who is seen in the accompanying picture emerging from the ocean, bare-chested with his jeans riding low on his hips. While many of his admirers would have described him as Adonis, to RGV he looked like Aphrodite or rather Urmila Matondkar in Rangeela. And the filmmaker went on to tell him that while he might be great in martial arts, he needed to take a tip or two from ‘Dragon’ Bruce Lee who, he pointed out, would never have become the legend he was had he posed like a bikini babe.

After urging the young actor to “please think”, RGV went on to advice Tiger to learn how to be macho from his own dad, Jackie Shroff, “who even without martial arts, poses more like a man and never like this”.

Tagging both Jackie and his wife Ayesha besides Tiger himself in the tweets, the maverick filmmaker was quick to add that his tweets were purely him “being a fan of Jackie and nothing else” and urged Jackie to tell his wife and son that. The veteran actor plays a significant role in RGV’s upcoming film, Sarkar 3, and he eulogised Tiger saying he might have a six-pack, but his dad’s eyes and body language is far better than many muscle groups.

He ended the Twitter monologue saying, “@iTigershroff Truly real men like Bruce Lee and @bindasbhidu (Jackie Shroff) don’t ever pose in a Urmila-ish way”.

When Mirror contacted him, the filmmaker insisted that he loves Tiger and wants him to look more macho while posing for pictures. “That was just done in my usual way which I keep doing at various times to various people,” he reasoned. “I love the way Tiger is so macho in his fights and I don’t like that very model-ish kind of pose. I would like to see him in more intense pictures and that’s what I expressed (myself).”

When asked if he had noticed any similarities between Urmila and Tiger, he said, he had said what he had to and wouldn’t comment further.

While Jackie and Tiger chose not to comment, Ayesha Shroff simply stated, “I have nothing to say to him (RGV).”