A star daughter once
looked amused as a newcomer rattled off his tale of woe. “If you really want to
know what it’s like to be a struggling actor these days, ask me. All I’m doing
is saving my ass.” he cried. For him, and those like him, the tide has
turned, and how! All these years, the ‘girls’ had to be careful of the casting
couch. Now it’s the turn of the ‘boys’ thanks to the strong gay clique that’s
allegedly running Bollywood.
It may be hush-hush and under the covers,
but if you believe the young, struggling actors and a few established
journalists, the gay clique actually exists. “A few actors and a bunch of
filmmakers are part of this gay clique. They are all whizkids. And their names
sell fast and furious at the box office. So not many even have the guts to
expose them,” says Bharati Pradhan, film columnist and former editor of ‘Star
and Style’.
Some names? It is alleged that both Rahul Roy and Shah Rukh
Khan had to sleep around in the industry to get their breaks. Insiders allege
that Rahul Roy was a big director’s ‘keep’ for a long time, while Shah Rukh Khan
had to hit the sack with another producer to get his maiden role in the TV
serial ‘Fauji’.
And if you think Salman Khan is fida over cat-eyed
Aishwarya, forget it Dahlings! Rumours go around about his real true love: a
dancer called Manoj who lives in Canada.
Now comes the nastiest,
steamiest gossip of all…that both the Khans are secretly involved with some of
the biggest names in the industry: Manish Malhotra, Karan Johar, Vivek
Vaswani... Says a young actor, who was allegedly approached by one of the Khans,
“The gay clique is very close knit and very rarely strays, except when one of
them is really interested in a new comer.”
Some say that Karan Johar and
Shah Rukh are a couple, while others have it that Manish Malhotra is involved
with Akshay Kumar. There are rumours that Akshay Kumar and designer Rocky.S have
been lovers for years, and when Rocky’s wife found out about it, she divorced
him unceremoniously.
As we mentioned earlier, the casting couch
syndrome seems to have reversed. The boys are made to grant sexual favours too!
Aftab Ahmed, a student of the acting school run by former actress Asha Sachdev,
recounts an incident when a big time director-producer came up to him and
suggestively said, “You want a role, I will give it to you. But you will have to
pay a price for it. He was very explicit about his demands.”
The scared
Aftab immediately went and reported this to Ashadidi (as they all call her).
Says Asha Sachdev, “I called up the guy right away and told him to keep his
hands off! It’s crazy, the kind of demands my students have to put up with. A
lot of them have complained to me about how they were approached by a director
or a producer. It’s disgusting. I always tell my boys to keep their distance,
it’s not worth it.”
This is not to say that in Bollywood’s every corner,
there are wolves lurking in sheep clothing. Just, that it pays to be a little
more careful, especially if you are an aspiring young actor, and good looking to
boot!
