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A city exhibition marks Amitabh Bachchan's 80th birthday with unseen memorabilia
Updated On: 09 October, 2022 07:46 AM IST | Mumbai | Yusra Husain
An archivist who began collecting Bachchan keepsakes since he was a boy of 10 in UP is ready to co-host an exhibit that showcases never-seen-before memorabilia to mark the actor’s 80th birthday
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Amitabh Bachchan and film historian SMM Ausaja at one of the latter’s archival exhibition on the superstar
This story begins in Uttar Pradesh, somewhere between Lucknow and Kanpur, cities where SMM Ausaja spent his youth. His obsession with Amitabh Bachchan began when he was 10. The year was 1981, an era when film postcards were still sold by the roadside. Young boys and girls spent their meagre pocket money on buying a postcard; otherwise they would make do with cutting up pages from film magazines. Ausaja says a postcard of film Kaalia which released on December 25, 1981, was one of the first to go into his collection, which has grown over the decades to make the Andheri resident one of India’s largest private collector of all things archival about Indian cinema and Bachchan in particular.
In the year that the superstar of Hindi cinema readies to celebrate his 80th birthday, Ausaja along with the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) and PVR Cinemas has planned an exhibit titled ‘Bachchan: Back to the Beginning,’ as it attempts to bring alive the 1970s and ‘80s, both decades when Bachchan ruled Bollywood as hero. Scheduled to run from October 8 to 11 at the PVR Juhu lounge, the exhibit will display Bachchan memorabilia that Ausaja says is being shown to the public for the first time. Perhaps, the only time. The showcase is part of a larger four-day film festival that surrounds the same theme, organised by FHF and PVR Cinemas, and expects to screen 11 of the actor’s super-hit movies including Don, Deewar, Chupke Chupke, Kaala Pathar, Amar Akbar Anthony, Satta pe Satta and Namak Halal across 25 cinema halls in 18 cities.
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