Superstition & Bollywood!

Of course the film industry has lately discovered in big way the comfort of astrology and numerology.
I know only one person who's married to a tree, and it isn't Aishwarya Rai. Of course some of her co-stars resemble chunks of unprocessed wood. But she never married any of them. The only person I know who's married a tree is Shabana Azmi. And no, it wasn't the one that recurred in Indra Kumar's cinema. Wonder what happened to Induji's 'lucky' tree, did it stop being lucky with the flops? Shabana did marry a tree, though. No, I'm not calling Javed saab a tree. The only tree that she married was in Aparna Sen's film Sati, recreating the ancient practice of marrying manglik mademoiselles to trees to get rid of their inauspicious aura.
Does anyone really believe the progressive Bachchans to be guilty of such practice? Did the family patriarch really need to tell the world that his bahu was never married to a tree? For the record, both Abhishek and Aishwarya are manglik . As far as I know this confluence of two challenging horoscopes automatically cancels out whatever harmful conspiracies destiny may have planned for the couple.
And by the way, one of the most successful marriages in the film industry bonds two mangliks - Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan. Yup the Bachchans are a family of mangliks . Has it made them any less successful, collectively or individually? Of course the film industry has lately discovered in big way the comfort of astrology and numerology. But I don't think our film folks allow the stars above to govern their lives beyond a point. For years Shah Rukh Khan has been advised by friends and well-wishers to move out of his bungalow Mannat. It's supposed to have brought SRK ill luck. What ill luck? All I see is good things happening to Shah Rukh's career and life. And instead of moving out of Mannat he's adding wings to his dream place. As for those of my friends in the entertainment business who subscribe to superstitions, let me say in their defence that no one in this cut-throat world of give-and-fake is going to invest crores in a project just because his favourite astrologer says so. Ekta Kapoor does seem to outwardly manifest and exude the most intense religiosity. And I respect her for her beliefs. But I don't think she for a minute believes that success happened to her because she prayed hard or that she became religious to attain success. Personal beliefs are personal, and that's the way they should remain.
Ekta, Karan Johar and Rakesh Roshan favour the letter 'k' as long as it works for them. The original 'K' specialist was Arjun Hingorani who believed in film titles with 3 Kab Kyun Aaur Kahan, Kahani Kismat Ki .
But he also made thundering 'K' flops like Khel Khiladi Ka and Kaun Kare Kurbani. When Subhash Ghai decides to put himself in one frame of all his films, when Sanjay Dutt wears a particular shirt to court or when Kangana Ranaut insists on looking at her sister's face before cutting any deal, I don't think they are being aggressively superstitious. It's just a homage to their comfort zone. I recently saw one of my closest friends in the film industry suddenly wearing an astrological ring. "I wore it because someone persuaded me to. I don't think it will change my life dramatically, or make me a calmer person. But what's the harm?" she reasoned.
Harm aur tum ? No way! In the fiercely competitive world of entertainment, more and more people would resort to tikkas on foreheads, rings, beads and amulets. If nothing else, they do look cool on a lot of Bollywood's folks. (Views expressed by columnists in Bombay Times are their own, and not that of the paper29 Jun, 2007 Subhash K Jha /TIMES NEWS NETWORK)