Really, this isn’t much of a news item at all.  But I can throw in some more details about the rumored project, at least?  Try to fluff it up with that?

Rani’s coming back, yaaaay!  And Rani’s PR team is playing into gender essentialism, boooo!  Bollywoodhungama is very carefully reporting it as:

“It took some time to convince her to act again, but Aditya heard the script and felt it would be perfect for her”

Boooo!  Booo, Yash Raj PR team!!!!  Why couldn’t Rani be eager to get back to work now that her child is presumably weaned and generally less needy?  Why does Aditya, her husband, get to pick the scripts for her?  Why do we need the implied approval of her husband before she is “allowed” to act?  See, this is why heroines resist marriage!  Because once they are married, and even more once they have kids, all of their announcements have to be phrased as though their husband is giving them permission to do stuff, and they would really be just as happy staying home.

Understand, I’m not saying that I don’t believe this is what really happened.  It’s completely possible that she would feel sad about leaving her child, and of course if your husband is a film genius-savant, you are going to trust his opinion as to which scripts to accept.  I just object that the PR team felt it was so super important to make sure that sentence was included in the article.

As for the film itself, no one knows anything.  It’s supposed to be socially relevant, I heard somewhere else it might be a biopic, possibly about Kalpana Chawla, possibly offered to Priyanka earlier and she turned it down.  If it is Kalpana Chawla, isn’t that interesting?  An American hero getting an Indian biopic because she was born in India.  Can you imagine, for instance, Germany making a high profile biopic of Kissinger?  Not saying it’s a bad or wrong idea, just interesting how much the Indian film industry has embraced the diaspora audience, and how much India as a whole has embraced its NRIs.

The one thing that is confirmed is that the director is Siddarth P. Malhotra.  No, not the hot guy who’s allergic to shirts, the small time director whose only previous film was the semi-flop We Are Family.  Why in the world is he getting this plum assignment?  And why did he get the semi-plum assignment to direct We Are Family a few years back?

(Not this guy)

Because he’s a Kapoor!!!  Sort of.  If I am reading this family tree correctly, his grandfather was Prem Nath, actor and Krishna Kapoor’s brother.  His grandmother was the actress Bina Rai, who was in a whole bunch of stuff back in the black-and-white era and I have no memory of her.  Siddharth’s father Prem Krishen is a former actor turned producer, made the films Garv: Pride and Honor and Ssssssh (terrible title, great songs).  And I guess Siddharth decided to go by “Malhotra” to try to avoid using his Kapoor/Nath/Krishen connections, and it didn’t work at all because everyone just calls him “Kareena and Ranbir’s cousin”.

He’s really their cousin twice over, in some way I don’t understand, because Krishna was Raj’s “aunt” before they were married.  I think “aunt” really means “cousin once removed”, but I’m not sure what degree of cousins they were or how that all works out.  But I do know that Krishna’s brother Prem Nath co-starred with Raj in Aag and Barsaat, and therefore had a front row seat to his new brother-in-law falling in love with someone not his wife.  Awkward!

(Now, pretend this is your brother-in-law and your sister just had a baby and is pregnant with a second, and you are watching your brother-in-law/boss/friend clearly passionately in love with his co-star.  Awkward!)