Indian cinema has come a long way since its inception, but with the passage of time, there has been a ton of loss in terms of film content. However, fighting against the inevitable march of time is Cinema Archivist SMM Ausaja, who has made it his goal to preserve as much as possible of Indian cinema. Well, now we hear that Ausaja is developing a coffee table book that will immortalize one of Indian cinemas’ most iconic personalities, Amitabh Bachchan.
“Yes, I am developing a coffee table book on Mr. Amitabh Bachchan. The idea for the book started back in 2008, and since then I have been working on it,” says Ausaja when talking to Bollywood Hungama exclusively about the book. Interestingly, Ausaja could well be one of the best persons to develop this book, in fact, recently SMM Ausaja was also appointed as a Consultant on an Oral history project by the Oscar academy that was based on Amitabh Bachchan. Ask him for details about the book he is developing and Ausaja adds, “The book is titled Bachchans, and it traces the history of the Bachchans ever since then migrated. It is about three generations of the Bachchans starting from Amitabh Bachchan’s father the poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan, then the Big B and Jaya Bachchan, followed by Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.”
Ask for more details on the book, and a more than happy Ausaja details, “Besides being an in-depth book, that will essentially be about five achievers of a single-family, it will also be a visual book, that uses images heavily. All the images are from my archives, which I have managed to collect over the years. But what makes it special is that these images will not be ones that have been seen before. So there will be an element of freshness to it.”
Coming to the final development and launch of the book which will be more of a career chronicle, through the use of imagery, Ausaja informs us, “The book will weigh nearly 3.5 Kgs and will be in a square format.” Being developed in association with OmBooks International, the makers are looking to launch it around the veteran actor’s birthday.