April 01, 2025

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Premium

The Cult of AMITABH

At any given time of the day, more than 1,00,000 people are watching a tall, dark, lanky figure sing, dance, and battle the forces of evil on the screen. Every year, an estimated 40 million Indians see his films, and when he leaves his elegant house in Bombay's Juhu-Villa AParle Scheme, film industry investments worth a staggering `50 crores* ride on him. So much in demand is film idol Amitabh Bachchan, that producers are told that they cannot expect shooting dates before 1983Naturally, Bachchan does quite well out of this situation. He is said to charge between `15 to 20 lakh per film, and according to one estimate, earned an average of `36,000 a day last yearHis cult following verges on the Incredible. And an inconsolable youngboy was brought all the way from Germany because after seeing Sholay, he thought that his hero had died. Bachchan once received a call from a doctor in Bombay's Nanavati Hospital, who said a girl in a coma after a severe fall kept calling the name of the Amitabh character in Amar Akbar Anthony. When the girl gained consciousness, she would not eat until Amitabh himself fed her. "That incident really shook me," he saysHis presence on a city street is enough to draw hundreds of fans. A mountain of mail from every corner of the world arrives by each post, with letters containing both adulation and propositions. All over India, barbers try to lure customers by offering `Amitabh Bachchan' haircuts, and men attempt to copy his intense, measured manner of speaking. At 38, Amitabh Bachchan is a certified superstar, Bombay's top actor and one of India's most recognizable facesTheatrical Lure To film industry insiders who have seen other cinema idols have their moments of glory and fade away, Bachchan's is a cult above the rest. He looks unlike other Bombay film stars, lacking the delicate, almost effeminate features of some, and the heavy macho image of others. In an industry where outrageous clothes and flashy jewellery are the vogue, he gets by in a pair of corduroy trousers and a T-shirt. And while every top star makes a fetish of arriving late on the sets and surrounding himself with a coterie of chamchas, Bachchan is invariably punctual and easily approachable. The difference may lie in his background and in the fact that he went into films at the relatively late age of 27The son of Harivanshrai Bachchan, the Hindi poet, he grew up in Allahabad and Delhi, numbering Rajiv and the late Sanjay Gandhi among his close friends. Educated at Sherwood College and Elite Public School in Nainital and the Delhi University's Kirori Mal College, from where he got his BSc., Bachchan worked for a couple of commercial firms in Kolkata after graduation. Five years as an executive, however, were more than enough for him. Says Bachchan, "I was merely pushing files around." He began to search for a diversion and founded an amateur English the-

The Day the Atomic Age Was Born

THE events that have changed man's destiny--the invention of the stone ax, the discovery of fire, the drift into the Industrial Revolution--few can be pinpointed in time. But one, possibly the greatest of all, can be timed to the min- Tute. At 3:36 p.m. on 2 December 1942, the world entered the Atomic Age. And I was one of 40-odd witnesses. The setting was hardly auspicious: a bleak, drafty, dimly lighted squash court under the abandoned and crumbling stadium at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. There, within a pile of uranium and graphite bricks the size of a small house, neutrons were being born by the billion each second and hurled out at velocities of 29,000 kilometres a second. Every one that hit the heart of another uranium atom shattered that atom to produce two neutrons. Thus, every few minutes, the silent, violent storm was doubling itself in history's first nuclear chain reaction. We were too awed to speak. The silence was broken only by the staccato rattle of counters keeping track of neutron production. All our advance reasoning indicated that we were safe. Yet we were pushing into territory never before explored. There was at least a chance that the pile would get out of control; that we would be destroyed and a large, thickly settled portion of Chicago would be converted into a radioactive wasteland. Would this, in fact, be doomsday? To Tickle a Mosquito SCIENCE SOMETIMES moves at a plodding pace. But, with atomic fission, events had moved at breakneck speed. Only four years before, at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, nuclear chemist Otto Hahn and his young assistant, Fritz Strassmann, had bombarded uranium with neutrons from an external sourceAfterward, chemical analysis showed that something extraordinary had happened. Barium and other substances not there before, had appeared as from nowhere and were mixed with the uranium! But if the two experimenters thought that they had split the heavy uranium into barium and other lighter elements, they weren't prepared to say soInterpretation fell to a former Hahn colleague, Lise Meitner, who because of her Jewish blood, had fled from Hitler's Germany to Sweden. There, during the Christmas holidays of 1938, she and her nephew, Otto Frisch, discussed Hahn's data. Possibly, their two brilliant minds concluded, these findings weren't so mysterious after all. Their friend Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, had visualized the nucleus of an atom as a liquid drop. If bombardment added an extra neutron to the nucleus, it might become unstable, elongate and divide. The electric repulsion between the two new droplets would be enormous. Within days, Frisch was putting these ideas to experimental test and finding them to be accurate.