By Aakash Karkare
A light hearted iftar story.
When Nisha and I started Kara Tales, it was with a view to tell interesting stories about food and the culture surrounding it. To go beyond the usual stories we see on social media. For the last few weeks we have been discussing ways in which we could cover Ramzan and Iftar that provided a fresh perspective. Numerous stories were vetoed. Attempts to find people to write about Iftar and Eid bit the dust. We could of course take you down the usual routes and talk about Mumbai’s Mahim area or Mohammad Ali Road and Bhindi Bazaar, or any other versions thereof in the rest of the country, but those stories weren’t hitting the spot. Other better versions existed. But yes of course, take your time to enjoy the food on offer in these places because it is usually the city’s best. Skip Sanju Baba chicken and just let your nose guide you. Don’t forget to eat some Bheja fry and a Malpua or two and the best sheikh kebab that I’ve ever had but never found again somewhere in Bhindi Bazaar. Or better yet, ask a friend to invite you home for their iftar and enjoy even better food.
But those food walks and routes are not a focus of this article.
Instead, we, meaning I, a lover of Bollywood gossip, since a very young age, decided to take another route. A story that always comes to my mind when I see photos from Baba Siddiqui’s star-studded iftar party.
I have grown up in a family consumed by Bollywood gossip, handed down by way of inheritance by a mother who loved the movies. Be like Amitabh Bachchan, because he worships his mother, I was frequently told. We even went to watch the ill-fated Harry Potter ripoff Drona because Shahrukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan had ended a feud at its premier. Copies of Stardust and Femina and Filmfare littered the storeroom in the house, bought second hand at bookstores that seemed in abundance back in the 90s. On weekend afternoons between my copies of Famous Five, I would devour these magazines and become enveloped in a world of glamour and petty tiffs. Chief among these was the Salman Khan and Shahrukh Khan feud.
These days, gossip does not seem to have the cultural cache anymore. It could be a “me problem” as is the parlance of our times. I no longer subscribe to any newspapers and consequently do not have access to the aforementioned film magazines or Bombay Times. The few times I have read them recently, they seem too carefully manicured. Like the current iteration of Koffee With Karan. Mumbai Mirror is also no longer in existence and gone with it is dearly beloved blind items column. It could also be that the ubiquity of celebrities on social media have taken away some of their glitz and glamour. I remember reading an interview with one of my favourite British comedians, Noel Fielding and him remarking that he always tried to look like a rockstar.
“You don’t want to see Mick Jagger walk out of a supermarket in his sweatpants,” I remember him saying.
Celebrities by being too real and normal have taken away the joy of gossip from us lesser mortals. Sorry for this digression.
To get back to the subject at hand. Each year during Ramzan, there would be a Bombay Times spread devoted to Baba Siddique’s Iftar Party. The who’s who of Bollywood would attend it. Who was he? Why were his parties so well attended? How could one get an invite? How good was the food? These questions never seemed to have an answer. For those who do not know, Siddique is a career politician and was the MLA of glitzy Bandra (West), whom one author has referred to as India’s Beverly Hills (and in whose cafe’s one can sometime still eavesdrop on the most juiciest pieces of gossip) from 1999-2009. He recently left the Congress for Ajit Pawar’s NCP Party (split from Sharad Pawar’s NCP), and used a food metaphor for this decision, “My condition in the Congress was how curry leaves are used to enhance the taste of food.”
We, at Kara, are quite the fans of the condiment? Accouterment? And to be treated like curry leaves would actually be quite the honour. Have to stick to food somehow, don’t we?
Like every year, Baba Siddique and his son Zeeshan Siddique hosted an Iftar party on March 24. As usual a host of celebrities showed up. Here’s a list: Salman Khan, Shilpa Shetty, Preity Zinta, Vijay Varma, Siddhant Chaturvedi, and Emraan Hashmi, Hina Khan, Aly Goni, Jasmin Bhasin, Gauahar Khan, Karishma Tanna, Avneet Kaur, Munawar Faruqui, Huma Qureshi, Pooja Hegde, Orry, Honey Singh, Shweta Tiwari and Palak Tiwari.
It had nothing on the one in 2013. Both in terms of the star power of its attendance and the levels of history that was created.
Before we talk about that we must go further back into the past.
The year is 2008. July to be exact. Katrina Kaif’s something or the other birthday. Something or the other because Kareena Kapoor claimed once on Koffee With Karan that she was lying about her birthday. “I want to see her passport” she replied to the question, “What would you do if you woke up as Katrina Kaif!”
“I would ask my boyfriend how he got his accent,” was Kaif’s rebuttal.
Ah, the glorious world of pre-social-media Bollywood celebrities.
Until here the facts are clear. Food, and birthdays, always make for drama of some kind. Drinks flow freely. People grow older. And emotional. And things come to a head. Salman who had been friends with Shahrukh Khan since Karan Arjun, followed by cameos by the former in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and by the latter in Har Dil Jo Pyaar Karega, had shown up drunk at a shooting of Chalte Chalte which Aishwarya Rai starred in. So tensions were already flared up. Salman was mad at Shahrukh for refusing a cameo in Main Aur Mrs Khanna.
“You are a matlabi insaan,” a website quotes him to have said. Apparently SRK said something about Aishwarya Rai. Fists flew. The party came to a close. People made an early exit. And apparently Ranbir Kapoor called the media.
“We have had a little bit of personal issue,” SRK said diplomatically at a leadership summit in 2012. “This is not the first time, it is about four years ago. We were very close for 20 years… We have certain things that are similar and there are certain things which we disagree on. So at this point of time, we are on that plane of disagreement.”
“I think like a father, while Salman thinks like a child!” he said in another interview, less diplomatically. “There is not much common between us, we think differently, we speak differently. We have spent a good time together. But with time, that fact has got blurred. We are happy in our worlds. If we come together it is good. If we don’t it’s even better. We are not friends.”
For the next few years, every few months and weeks, the feud would continue with jibes. Bollywood, one big fat happy Indian family, had been split into two camps. The two biggest stars, the Khans were feuding. Aamir Khan was asked to take sides but he was too busy making eight packs if I recall correctly.
All of this ended in 2013. At another dinner party. At Baba Siddiqui’s iftar party. It seems like another time. A more innocent time. Food and festivals are enough to make even the most stone-hearted amongst us sentimental. In a hug heard around the world (not really because can anyone hear a hug but I’m quite partial to the phrase), and splashed across the front pages of several newspapers on the following day, SRK and Salman had finally patched up. Badshah, who took his name from the 1999 iconic Shahrukh film of the same name, even spoke about it on a podcast with Raj Shamani.
“I met Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan backstage of an award show,” he said. “I think they’d just had their patch up, apparently. I remember my manager telling me, ‘Shah Rukh sir is calling you’. I went to meet him. Salman sir was also there. They were talking to each other, I was standing there looking at them. Later, food was served, and they fed me biryani. They were sharing anecdotes with each other, and I was listening to them. Then I had to leave.”
The rest as they say is history. The duo appeared together in the ending of Pathaan. And will also appear in Tiger 3. So next time you have a tiff with a friend or a family member, just get an invite to Baba Siddiqui’s iftar party. It seems to heal all. Just don’t ask him about curry leaves.
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