I am often asked why three films on Amitabh Bachchan and my answer is why not? One day I was with friends and suddenly everybody started conversing in Bachchan film dialogues. That’s when an idea struck and a book was born.
Amitabh Lexicon captures 2,833 head words of the English dictionary into films of the actor, a colourful joyride into Bachchan’s memorabilia.
Forty-one years and 174 films (and counting) … Amitabh Bachchan has long since sublimated the language of cinema that is peculiar to Hindi films. He has worked its verbs, overwhelmed its adjectives, brought to life its nouns, subjugated its predicates and predicated its subjects. This does render it easy for a writer to describe his phenomenon but then, makes it equally difficult to, when one seeks to summarise it.
Nearly every word in the English language could find its place in the cinematic vocabulary of Amitabh Bachchan.
Therefore, this attempt, to take you through a Lexicon of his various personas on screen – scenes where he made you cry, laugh, and all shook up. Like he says in his film Namak Halaal “Lo karlo baat…aree English toh aisi ave hain ke that I can leave angrez behind… I can talk English, I can walk in English, and I can laugh English…”