Actor Mukesh Khanna, popularly known as Shaktimaan, was in the news recently after he took at Sonakshi Sinha. He had said the ongoing re-runs of shows like Ramayan will be good for people like Sonakshi Sinha who have no knowledge about India’s mythology.
Sonakshi had earlier failed to answer a question on Ramayan, on the TV show Kaun Banega Crorepati. And now, Khanna has hit out at producer Ekta Kapoor, for ‘murdering Mahabharata’.
He was referring to Ekta’s Kahaani Hamaaray Mahaabhaarat Ki that was out in 2008.
“The new version of Shaktimaan cannot be the way Ekta Kapoor made Mahabharata (in 2008) by putting a tattoo on Draupadi’s shoulder. She had said that she was making Mahabharata for modern people. ‘Sanskriti kabhi modern nahi ho sakti, putri. Jis din Sanskriti ko modern karoge, khatam ho jayegi’,” Khanna told the Mumbai Mirror in an interview. Khanna had played Bhishma in B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat that aired in Doordarshan in 1988. The show is also being retelecast now during the lockdown.
He added: “Who has given them the right to slaughter an epic? They have changed the actual version of Devarath’s ‘Bhishma Pratigya’ to something else and created a vamp-like image for Satyavati, among other things in the show.
On popular demand, Doordarshan has brought back yesteryear favourites Ramayan, Mahabharat and even Shaktimaan, during the lockdown period. Khanna said that he is happy Shaktimaan is also back on TV and that the superhero is still as popular as he was in 1997 during which it first aired. He added that he does not want a new version of Shaktimaan.
Directed by B.R. Chopra, Mahabharat featured Gajendra Chauhan, Praveen Kumar, Arjun, Sameer Chitre and Sanjeev Chitre as the Pandavas, Roopa Ganguly as Draupadi, Nitish Bharadwaj as Krishna, Mukesh Khanna as Bhishma Pitamah and Punit Issar as Duryodhan.
