Bollywood filmmaker Sanjay Gupta's latest tweet is going viral. "I feel compelled to share this. Back in the 1990s when the underworld bullying of the film stars was at its peak, SRK was THE ONLY star who never gave in. 'Goli marni hai mar do, par tumhaare liye kaam nahin karoonga. Main Pathan hoon', he told them. He is the same today," the Bollywood director tweeted today, praising SRK's guts.
In her book 'King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema', senior film journalist Anupama Chopra described an anecdote involving SRK and underworld gangster Abu Salem.
Abu Salem once telephoned SRK (that was sometime in the late 1990s) and abused him for refusing a script offered by a Muslim producer. SRK reasoned to Salem that he was already working with a handful of Muslim producers. After this, Abu Salem calmed down although the gangster tried to influence SRK's film choices later.
The book says that SRK was repeatedly called by Salem. The gangster's aim was to extract inside information about Bollywood personalities from SRK. But SRK was advised by a top cop not to share any information.
The underworld threat ended in the early 2000s. Bollywood slowly came out of the shadow of gangsters once the producers there didn't need their funding.
