Actor Aditya Redij has been receiving a positive response since the first episode of his new show Porus hit the small screen on 27th November. The show, produced by Siddharth Kumar Tewary's Swastik Production, is based on the Battle of Hydaspes and Aditya plays the role of Porus's father in it.
Talking about the challenges he faced for playing the role of King Bamani of Paurav Rashtra, he says, " Every day is a new challenge, whether it is wearing 15 kilos of costumes and carrying a six kilos sword along with it. Wearing heavy costumes, carrying a heavy sword and then doing an action sequence on a horse is not an easy job. Every day it has been a tough job, not just physically but mentally too because the character demands intensity which is mentally exhausting. Sometimes we have to do emotional scenes for continuous two-three days with the costumes. It’s challenging but when we are seeing the outcome on-screen, it makes us feel very happy."
The coastline of Thailand has been passed off as river Jhelum. He recalls a special day during the shoot. "I remember that we were shooting on an island for a sequence. We were running against time. We had to shoot in the daylight and it used to get dark very soon. It used to rain heavily. I remember Rahul Tewary was directing our action sequence which was being filmed between me and Gurpreet, who is playing the role of Ambhiraj. We finished the action sequence in around three hours. We used to shoot in multiple units and used to compete with each other for delivering better quantity and quality work. They were really impressed with the kind of results our action sequence had given which was quite satisfying for us," says the actor.
The show also stars actors such as Laksh, Rati Pandey, Praneet Bhatt and Gurpreet Singh. Aditya enjoyed bonding with these actors on the sets and feels he has earned friends for a long time.
"The entire star cast is very friendly, they don’t have any attitude problem. All of us have been good friends for a long time now. We support each other. We all are staying far away from our families. So we are there for each other emotionally throughout," says the actor and adds, "It's been amazing working with all of them."
The actor is all in praise for the show, which has given him an opportunity to learn something new with the passing time.
"It’s been a superb experience and I got to learn a lot of things. We have been given a lot of time to prepare for the role. We have been shooting for months. We have been given underwater training in Thailand. We have learnt sword fighting and horse riding which was completely a different experience for us. It was quite exciting. I don’t think, I had to prepare myself so much for playing a role in the way I have done for this one," he says.
Speaking at a business event, she basically said her village roots made it harder.
Directly named SRK, calling him a Delhiite with a convent education.
Threw "brutal honesty" out there as her secret weapon.
You can already imagine the social media frenzy this kicked off.
It's the latest salvo in the whole insider-outsider war that never ends.
Well, she's done it again. Kangana Ranaut, now MP, just reframed the entire Bollywood struggle debate with one comparison. At a recent industry gathering in Delhi, she got to talking about her success. And then she brought up Shah Rukh Khan. Not with nostalgia. She positioned her own journey from a no-name Himachal village as the tougher path against his, what she termed, convent-educated Delhi background, and it obviously sparked reactions online.
Kangana says coming from a small village and being brutally honest shaped her journey in Bollywood Getty Images
So what did she actually say?
Her exact words: "Why did I get so much success?" she asked the room. Classic Kangana, starting with a question she's about to answer herself. "There is probably nobody else who came from a village and got such success in the mainstream. You talk about Shah Rukh Khan. They are from Delhi, convent-educated. I was from a village that nobody would have even heard of, Bhamla." And the punchline is that she believes it's her "brutal honesty" that did the trick.
Kangana calls brutal honesty her secret weapon in the film industryGetty Images
Let's talk about these two different worlds
Look at the facts. Kangana. Bhamla. Left at 15 for Mumbai, a kid with no roadmap. Her fight in the industry is well-documented, every step a battle she talks about. Four National Awards though, that's huge. Then Shah Rukh. Delhi. Lost his parents young, sure. But he cut his teeth on TV, became a name before he even hit films. His Mumbai move in '91 led to... well, to being King Khan. Both stories are about making it from nothing. But nothing means different things depending on your postcode, apparently.
Shah Rukh Khan’s Delhi upbringing gets compared to Kangana’s village struggleGetty Images
And the fallout?
It's a mess online, obviously. You have one side cheering her on for saying the quiet part out loud: that a village girl with no English has a steeper hill to climb than a guy from the capital. Then the other side is just exhausted. They're saying it's a cheap shot, that it diminishes Khan's own loss and grind. Does this debate even go anywhere? It just seems to recycle every few months. But people click. They always click.
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