• Home
• /
• Entertainment

Amitabh recommends Akshay

Mehra is working on a biopic of the athlete. Bachchan felt that Milkha Singh’s life and times made a terrific story.

“It is a subject that carries immense potential to become a great film. There is history, patriotism, humanity, achievement against odds and a story of incredible pathos and poetic justice,” Big B wrote on his blog.

Bachchan said that Mehra was non-plussed about the casting. “They had not even started thinking of it, the task being mammoth. I looked at Akshay seated next to me in the theatre and told Rakeysh ‘take him.’

“As a young kid barely in his teens he saw his entire family hacked to death in front of his eyes during the rioting that took place on the Pakistan side. And all he could see and remember was his dying father screaming to him, ‘Bhaag, bhaag Milkha bhaag’ (‘Run, run Milkha run’), to escape from being killed by the marauding rioters,” Bachchan wrote. The visuals of the dastardly act perpetually within him, his entire family killed before his very eyes, impoverished and alone he ran across to the Indian side of the imaginary border and became one of the greatest ‘runners’ of the country.”