Amitabh Bachchan has been hosting Kaun Banega Crorepati for 25 years now, and it looks like he prepares himself to stay on top of his game. In a recent interview, director Apoorva Lakhia shared that Amitabh Bachchan likes to stay informed about current affairs, even when he is traveling abroad. While it’s easier to stay informed thanks to the internet these days, things weren’t the same 20 years ago. At that time, Bachchan would get newspapers flown in every morning to Bangkok so he could read them all on a daily basis.
Apoorva was talking about the shoot of Ek Ajnabee, which was released in 2005, and starred Amitabh Bachchan and Arjun Rampal in lead roles. In a chat with Friday Talkies, Apoorva recalled that during those days, Bachchan would receive newspapers from India via a Mumbai-Bangkok morning flight; the papers would be returned to India via an evening flight. “At that time, there used to be a morning flight (from Mumbai) to Bangkok, and it used to go back (to Mumbai) in the evening. So Rosy (his secretary), would collect all the newspapers and she would send them in the flight. And here, someone would collect all the newspapers and give them to Amit ji and he would read all of them,” he shared.
Apoorva added, “He would sit with a marker and mark out a few things and then the papers would go back to India at night,” he said. Apoorva said that Amitabh Bachchan would do this activity in the morning for around 30 minutes, and then get on with his day.
In the same chat, he shared that Amitabh Bachchan is an insomniac, but would always wake up on time, even if the shoot was to start at the crack of dawn. But, he also added that Big B likes to take an afternoon nap for two and a half hours, and he always lets the filmmaker know about it in advance so they can work it in within their schedule.