Somewhere between a Tuesday night rumour and a Wednesday midnight blog post, Amitabh Bachchan managed to send half of India into a spiral, without even leaving his house.
What the rumour said
Journalist Vickey Lalwani reported that the megastar had been admitted to Nanavati Hospital from Saturday, May 16, and had been sitting in the A-wing VIP enclosure for three days straight. The reason? Stomach-related issues, complications apparently tied to his on-set accident during the filming of ‘Coolie’. The report also named Abhishek Bachchan as a hospital visitor. Social media did the rest. Fans flooded timelines with prayers, get-well messages, and enough worry to fill a film set.
What actually happened
ETimes got to the bottom of it, and the truth is far less dramatic. Yes, Bachchan did walk into Nanavati Hospital on Saturday. But it was nothing more than his regular monthly check-up. He walked in, got checked, and walked right back out.
“Mr Bachchan did visit Nanavati Hospital on Saturday, however, it was a regular check-up which he goes for every month and he returned home after that,” a source close to the family told ETimes.
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And if that weren’t enough to shut the rumours down, the very next day Bachchan was spotted driving his own car from his residence Jalsa to his other property Janak. Not exactly the behaviour of someone parked in a hospital VIP ward.
Big B posts a cryptic poem at 12:19 am
Because apparently Bachchan doesn’t just deny rumours, he does it in verse. In the early hours of Wednesday, he quietly dropped a note on his personal blog. No press statement, no angry denial. Just poetry, in Hindi.
In English, that roughly translates to: when the eagle goes quiet, the parrots start talking. They say, come, let us also offer our advice. After a meal of millet bread and greens, mouths that were empty suddenly crow like ravens. One stayed a mirror of brother Hill’s learning; the other, a memory of Wellington.
Where he actually is
Far from resting, his schedule is packed. He is currently on set filming the sequel to ‘Kalki 2898 AD’. He recently wrapped the 17th season of ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati’. And his next release is ‘Section 84’, a courtroom drama directed by Ribhu Dasgupta. The eagle, it turns out, is doing just fine.