Happy Saturday! We get to go to doggie training class, and I will do laundry, and other fun stuff. And also, wait to see if my eye unswells itself.
Yesterday at work my eye started to feel really scratchy and irritated, so I rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. And then my boss said “What happened to your eye???? It looks like you were punched!” So I went to look at my face in the mirror, and yep! It was all red and swollen and angry looking. Rinsed it out and put a wet paper towel on it, then work was over in half an hour anyway so I stopped by a Walgreen’s clinic on the way home and went “my eye! What’s happening?” The nice nurse practitioner ran me through some basic tests and confirmed that nothing terrible is happening, just wait and see. So that’s what I am doing today, waiting and seeing. Fun!
Now, for something you all can talk about, how about “Which Deepika Cannes dress do you like best?”
dontcallitbollywood 
Important thing to talk about: Malaal trailer is out! I finally could see new sweetheart Meezaan in action. I don’t remember if I ever was so excited for a trailer.
What do you think? Nothing groudbreaking but not bad also. I wish I could watch it in cinema!
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I agree, note groundbreaking but not bad! It reminds me a lot of Notebook.
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 8:37 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Deepika’s dresses are too out there for me. She’s usually elegant. Could it be she’s hiding a baby bump?
Now, here’s what I want to know. Scrolled Netflix last night for my evening’s entertainment and the screen shot of Mission Istanbul, a 2008 movie, caught my eye. The story was a bit of a mish-mash and I’m not a Zayed Khan fan, but what a pantheon of hot Indian guys in the cast! (You can never go wrong with Suniel Shetty) The hottest by far was Vivek Oberoi. I first saw him in Omkara and he was amazing. What happened? Why doesn’t he make more films? I You Tubed something messy with Salman Khan a hundred years ago (still not sure what) and a Modi biopic being blocked from release because of…I don’t know. Vivek’s a good actor, easy on the eyes,and can dance some. What’s the deal?
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Oh my goodness! BEST SCANDAL EVER!!!!!!
Viviek burst on the scene in Company (also on Netflix), a brilliant magnetic performance that rocketed him to the big leagues immediately. Meanwhile, Aishwarya Rai was dating Salman Khan and it was an open secret that the relationship was nasty and abusive (this is the only time, by the way, that there has been any indication of abuse in Salman’s romantic relationships. And he has never blamed or attacked her for speaking out about it which, to my mind, means he accepts his guilt and responsibility). Aish finally broke up with him, after much drama, and rebounded by dating Viviek. None of this was official of course, this was back when couples would be seen together an everyone would know they were together, but the public line was always “just good friends”.
Aish went to Cannes, her international career looked like it was about to take off. And while she was out of the country, Viviek called a press conference and announced a) he and Aish were together, b) Salman is abusive to both of them, and c) Salman is insane and his family should get him treatment. It was just a terrible terrible idea! And I don’t even think it was the right thing to do. I am sure Salman was abusive to both of them (middle of the night threatening phone calls, like that). But I don’t think Viviek was right to make all of this public without Aish’s permission, it’s her issue and not his. And I really don’t think it was right for him to lash out and say Salman’s family didn’t love him, wasn’t doing the right thing by not handling this. Aish and Salman both never forgave him. Aish has never publicly interacted with him since then, and never directly responded to the press conference. And Salman is very open about never ever forgiving him or wanting to forgive him. Salman gets into a fair number of feuds, and his public statements are always very courteous, he has issues with this person but that shouldn’t affect anyone else, it is personal. But with Viviek he straight up says that he will never forgive him, and he warns everyone around him not to work with him.
Viviek’s career was dead after that. Salman blacklisted him, and besides the lack of consideration shown by his decision making, and the scandal around it all, made him toxic. He went from next big thing, like bigger than any of the young stars are now, to completely toxic.
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 8:51 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Vivek dated Aishwarya Rai after she broke up with Salman. Salman was (or is?) a very unstable and angry person. He used to harass Aish by going to her apartment and shouting and banging on the door all night long. Once he deliberately crashed his car into hers. He used to go on the set of SRK’s film sets of Chalte Chalte and Devdas because Aish was working with him at that time. He caused tantrums sometimes, other times he would lay on the floor drunk, and finally once caused a lot of havoc and destroyed the Chalte Chalte set. They had to shut down production for a few days and removed Ash from the movie.
He couldn’t handle her dating someone else after the break-up so he started harassing Vivek too by calling him and giving him threats. One night he called Vivek 40 times. Her father filed police reports against Salman and she released a statement saying Salman had been physically and mentally abusive to her and had also cheated on her.
After the 40 calls incident, Vivek called a press conference and told them how Salman was harassing him and Aish and spilled a lot of dirty details. The industry was not happy with him bringing all this stuff out publicly and many people stopped working with him. He still got some movie offers but made a lot of wrong choices and picked bad ones over good ones. Eventually he just faded out. He was also very arrogant so he used to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Aditya Chopra had famously told him once, “You could be the next SRK but the problem is that you already think you are.”
Aish soon dumped Vivek and started dating Abhishek. Vivek turned out to quite a weasel and started publicly apologizing to Salman (thinking that would bring his career back) and would give interviews calling Aish “fake” and “plastic” and so on.
Eventually everyone moved on. Aish married Abhishek. Salman turned to charity and became more stable. Vivek had an arranged marriage but it seems like a good one. From time to time, he tried to make a movie comeback. This time around, he was sucking up to the right wing and framing himself as a patriot (the Akshay Kumar method) and starred in a propaganda movie as Modi. His dreams turned to dust again as the Election Commission didn’t allow the movie to release saying that it could influence the election.
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Thanks Margaret and Anon. That clears it up a lot. So basically, Salman can do no wrong. Despite incidents of bad behavior, he remains popular as ever. Aish works constantly and generally displays glacial correctness. Yet, many years after the incident, both stars can’t move on. They refuse to forgive, or to at least be politically “big” about it. Instead, they nurse their antipathy towards Vivek in public . His frantic apologies, “creep” label, and bad decisions notwithstanding,(being intelligent doesn’t necessarily equate with being savvy) he’s stuck in career limbo. Why can’t producers, directors and fans see that the guy has what it takes and give him a chance? Seems like it’s the industry’s loss.
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Kind of. That’s how it looked back in 2003. But in the years since, Salman and Aish have found a way to forgive each other and move on. Salman has stopped drinking and has revealed massive medical issues (he has Trigeminal Neurolgia, the “suicide disease”), and has continued to be known as the most generous and kindest man in the industry. And Viviek has had chances, he’s been the lead in a few movies since and had plenty of character parts. If his talent was true, if all the promise had paid off, he could certainly have moved forward despite the Salman feud. Now, it looks more like Viviek was a shallow talentless man who used the personal life of two other more famous people in order to try to make himself special, did something that neither of the other people involved wanted or needed for purely selfish reasons.
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 10:19 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Vivek would have survived if he made the right choices. After the press conference, he will still offered films like Hum Tum (lead role). He was offered Circuit’s role in Munnabhai too and even Arjun’s role in Om Shanti Om. He made the wrong choices constantly. Sometimes luck is not on your side.
Salman also has huge problems with Arjit Singh but hasn’t been able to ruin his career. Arjit is still doing great.
Salman always polarizes people. His fans are diehard and blame everyone else for everything. All his court cases – the hit and run, animal poaching, etc – there’s always an excuse. Some of his male fans actually like him just because of all this because they think he’s big and macho. Every time he goes to jail, his male fans stand outside and shout and scream. He gets bail and they light firecrackers.
On the other hand, he has his own good points. He’s known to be very loyal to his friends and family. The people who are close to him swear by him. Salman is the type who will stick by you through thick and thin if he likes you. He still lives in a small one bedroom apartment next to his parents and rides his bike around the neighborhood. He’s not very starry in that sense.
Reshma Shetty (his publicist until recently) helped turn out his bad boy image for the general public by positioning him as a philanthropist through his Being Human foundation. There would be a constant bombardment of his charitable activities. I have seen some hilariously silly articles during her reign – there would be stories about how Salman got out of his car and bought chocolate for street kids and other funny stuff. Now that Salman has fired her, the Being Human activities have gone into the background. You hardly hear anything these days but it doesn’t matter. The image revamp is complete so it doesn’t matter.
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He’s such a bag of contradictions. I see how Katrina is so loyal to him years after they broke up and yet what he did to Aish was freakin’ nightmarish. I wonder if he’s ever apologized to her?
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He’s loyal to all his girlfriends. One of his relationships (maybe the one before Aish?) partly broke up because he was paying to fly his ex’s father to America for medical treatment and going along for support. He’s opened businesses, done all kinds of other things for his other girlfriends. And they all come to his family weddings and other events. I don’t know if he has apologized to Aish or taken public responsibility, but (based on how Aish seems to handle her public appearances), that may have been her choice and not his. I don’t think she would want the whole thing dragged up again. And since Salman and Abhishek now appear friendly, I think we can assume there was some kind of private arrangement that was reached.
I don’t want to sound like I am excusing abuse, it is never okay, but I can also believe that Salman’s drinking and medical problems and just random chance made his relationship with Aishwarya different from any of his other relationships before or since.
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 2:13 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Star kids who go away to good universities like Sara going to Columbia or Aryan at USC is because they’re parents made donations right? I mean I find it hard to believe that they slogged around for hours taking practice tests for the SATs and lots of studying and preparation classes. I’m sure they took the SATs but I’m sure they already knew they were going to get in cause of the donations right? I’m just curious. Now Ananya Pandey has been saying that she got into USC but declined for films and her mom just said this week that she keeps sending out emails or letters to USC to keep her admission to be safe. I mean that makes no sense, you can only defer acceptance for like 6 months at the most, after that your seat is gone. She turned 18 in 2016 but by the looks of her Instagram grad pics looks like she graduated high school in 2017 when she was going on 19. So how can they hold onto an acceptance for 2 years? A lot of people have been calling her out for this recently, that it’s a lie.
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No, I don’t think it’s because their parents made donations. It’s not that hard to get into those universities. That is, if you have the money and don’t need a scholarship, and if you can afford to send your kids to good schools, and hire test tutors. And have a unique background. Donations don’t hurt, but I can’t imagine the Pandays have anything close to the kind of money you would need to spend for a donation to have an effect on a top American university. Shahrukh does, but I don’t think Aryan needs it, he went to a really really good high school and has done well at UCLA, I don’t see why we should assume he got in on anything beside his own merits. Same with Suhana and NYU.
I should clarify, most people in my family went to (or at least got into) schools at the level of Columbia and UCLA. And we did it just by going to good schools, not buying our way in. That’s why I’m so “sure, why not?” about it. You don’t have to be super super super smart, you just have to be decently smart. And if you aren’t book/school smart, then you can do what Alia Bhatt did and just not go to one of those schools. Or go to a different school overseas that is easier to get into, like Ranveer Singh. I don’t really see the kind of pressure to only go to one particular school that would drive folks to pay offs.
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 10:41 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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I went to an Ivy and agree with everything you said. Also, schools love international students because they pay free tuition so it’s a profit center for them.
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FULL tuition, not free
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Yeah, the American testbuying scandal is mostly causing a reaction in me of “how dumb/lazy must these kids be if they had to pay their way into getting into school? It’s not that hard!!!!” Well, dumb/lazy or just not cut out for school. Which goes back to the Alia Bhatt possibility, she’s very talented and smart and good at living life, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she only got so-so grades in school. Good for her and her parents in deciding that there was no point in college, especially some prestigious overseas program, if she wanted something else. Some people just aren’t cut out for school and it’s fine. But if you have any kind of school ability, and your family is rich enough to pay for tutors and good private schools and full tuition, you can always get in somewhere decent.
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 2:14 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Yeah, it’s not that hard. I went to a pretty terrible urban high school and yet there were plenty of students in my class who got into upper tier schools and that too with scholarships. None of us were studying overly hard or anything.
It’s the ones with a terrible home life or no time to do schoolwork (due to having to work) that have a hard time. Everyone else does fine!
It’s unbelievable that parents of rich American kids have to pay donations. How dumb can you be?! If you’re a native English speaker, the verbal section is so incredibly easy and if you paid attention in your math classes and did reasonably well, the math section is not that hard either.
I would judge a rich person so hard if they didn’t do well on their SATs. How is it even possible?
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I would judge a rich person if they didn’t do well, and they wanted to. I was talking this over with a friend just now, like a couple hours ago after reading your comment, and she said that Lori Loughlin’s daughter is the one she really feels for in the American story. Because she was doing great as an instagram “influencer”, like she had an actual career built up. totally understand if she didn’t have the grades, it’s the same as someone I knew who did so-so in high school classes but was promoted to manager at the store she was working by age 16. If you are focused on your job and a life outside of school, your work will suffer. But then why the heck did her parents feel like she had to go to college? to the point of paying her way in????
That’s one small thing I admire about these heroines who have the young starts. Better for their parents to accept that they want a career and school is not for them, than to force school them.
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Aryan (and Sara too probably) went to elite schools all their life so I don’t think it would be difficult for them to do well on their SATs. They already had the kind of education most high school kids can only dream of. Nor would SRK need to make any donations because who wouldn’t want someone with Aryan’s background? It’s not just about grades – the son of a Muslim celebrity who went to the best school in India followed by an elite prep school in the UK for 4 years and would help the diversity on campus? Not only that, SRK’s son going there helps popularize the school’s name to a huge audience. How many international students would consider USC knowing SRK’s kid went there? Plenty. He would be a shoo-in without any donations.
The dean herself was fangirling when SRK went to NYU for Suhana and posted pics and videos of him. Would they honestly reject her? NYU’s official twitter account was even retweeting comments about Suhana going there in the fall.
Ananya’s story is a lie. She never applied to any colleges because she always wanted to be an actress. They just made up that story because the Indian audience identifies a lot with education. They probably wanted her to look smart. Some classmates of hers have been calling her out for her college lie but Ananya claims they are just jealous of her.
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BTW Margaret, how’s the eye doing?
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It’s SO WEIRD!!!! My eye is fine now, not red or anything, but half my face is slightly swollen up. So slight that you can’t even see it unless you look closely, but I can feel it.
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 11:06 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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So I’m still watching Swades (it’s been a crazy week so I haven’t been able to spend more 30 minutes at a time on it) and wow it is so reminiscent of Lagaan. I know that it’s the same director so it makes sense but the whole “we have an impossible task in a rural village that requires the hero to bring people of all castes together for a noble cause” plot. It’s kind of freakish. Loving SRK in this though, he’s bringing the low key sexy which is right up my alley. Don’t like the female lead, though. She’s kind of a big nothing. I can think of a lot of other actresses who’d be way better.
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I love the female lead! Although that could also be her performance. Anyway, I think this was her only movie. certainly her only big movie. And then she married someone and retired.
Wait until you get to the love scene, it is very lowkey sexy. They hold hands and smile at each other and it is super hot.
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 2:17 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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OMG baby Aamir’s in the film, LOL. I was not expecting that.
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Wait, what????
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 9:56 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Oh, I finally figured out this comment!!! Yaadon Ki Baarat on the screen, of course.
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(I’m with Alisa on the female lead, think it would be a better movie with a different actress in that part. I like her mom, though.)
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More I look at the white dress, the more I like it. Really sweet and fun. But the green one…I don’t have words, especially for this turban. WHY? The look would be much better without this thing on Deepika’s head.
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Maybe she just really wanted to make sure she was talked about?
On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 2:53 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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I wish Loreal would end their contract with Deepika. I hate her roaming around on red carpets for no real good reason. It looks desperate. She doesn’t need to grab attention like a model or starlet by wearing crazy clothes. She is begging for attention with all her retweets and bragging about any international publication saying 2 nice things about her dress. Come on, you are a famous and respectable actress. Please have respect for yourself. Leave the Kardashian type stuff to others.
Priyanka has nothing else to do so whatever. Aishwarya comes out of hibernation for 2 days for Cannes so fine. Deepika is a relevant actress as of now so please stop doing this!
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I’m very familiar with what is called “the college process” ( taught HS for a long time) Aryan and Sara are quite capable of getting in on their own merit. They were helped by being from far away, having good SAT scores, good grades AND paying full tuition. I
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Yep! Really any of those kids who went to fancy schools. In a way I guess you could still say they are “Buying” their way in through the tuition to good schools since kindergarten that made the SAT and good grades in high school so easy
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Back to the Vivek Oberoi discussion, did anyone notice this tweet of his which is getting a lot of flak and even a legal notice from the National Commission for Women? https://twitter.com/vivekoberoi.
I guess once a creep always a creep in his case. Why is he still doing this???
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Yep, writing related post now, SO HARD finding citations for 2003.
On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 3:14 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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I know Margaret doesn’t like politics but in India they intervene so much that’s it’s necessary to bring it up sometimes. This meme is based on the fact that voting has ended and exit polls have been coming out saying that BJP/Modi are going to have a landslide victory.
Vivek shared a meme that basically says exit polls may not actually be what happens in reality. The outcome might end up being different. It was crassly connected to Ash’s dating life meaning that Salman was like opinions polls or what you wish to happen. Vivek was like exit polls or what you think will happen. Abhishek is what actually happened … meaning that the real election can end up with a totally different outcome than expected. Technically he was poking fun at himself too.
He is totally stupid for getting involved in this because he doesn’t have any right to drag other people like Salman and Ash into a joke he wanted to make.
He’s not apologizing because he’s feeling emboldened that the BJP is going to come back. He is their favored prized pig just like Akshay Kumar is. They can get away with anything and the BJP IT cell is always there to abuse everyone else.
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