Is John Abraham Trying To Be Another Akshay Kumar?

John’s career  has never been a shining example of sustained stardom.When he arrived he was  a male Katrina Kaif. He couldn’t speak  Hindi. And he cleverly focused on building an image as Bollywood’s first mainstream hero who was a pinup boy.

It worked. But John  got ambitious. He wanted the world know he  was not just a body but also an  actor. Valiant attempts to act in films like  Nagesh Kukunoor’s Ashayein, Nishikant  Kamat’s Rocky Handsome and  Shoojit Sircar’s  Madras Café  made John more ambitious.

 I first came to know about  John in  2001 as  my dear friend  and rakhi-sister Raveena Tandon’s  new friend. We were sitting  together at dinner at the Taj Lands End along with the rest of  the team of Kamal Haasan’s film Abhay  after  its premiere, when Raveena  leaned over  and whispered , ‘I’ve to go for a quick spin with a new friend.  He has  bought a  new mo’bike.’ And she was out before anyone could  notice.

This was  my “introduction” to John Abraham.Later I  got to know  him as Bipasha Basu’s boyfriend and then as an actor making every effort to be taken seriously by an audience that  moves ahead quickly .

He now wants  to  be another  Akshay Kumar.Parmanu is his first stab at pitching himself as a patriotic hero. The  battle with KriArj was  conducted to ensure that John’s plans  of pitching the patriotic  tent right  next to Akshay Kumar was undertaken in the spirit that  the wannabe AK (a.k.a John)  wanted.

Says a  former friend of Abraham, “Ever since John worked  with  AK in Garam Masala he has  seen himself in the same  mould.And now when AK is  doing all these films with a social relevance  John came  up with Parmanu,  his own version of AK’a Airlift/Toilet Ek Prem  Katha/PadMan where the actor gets to play a real-life national hero.However there  is  a difference between  AK pitching himself as a  patriotic  hero and John  doing the same. The  diffence will be out in the open when Parmanu releases and  receives  the  attention that it deserves.”

In  the meanwhile John has  gone  a step ahead with his Akshay Kumar plans. His next project directed  by Milap Jhaveri has now been titled—hold your breath—Satyamev Jayate. It couldn’t get any  more patriotic than that, could it?

It can!  And it did. Because John will release Satyamev Jayate on Independence Day August 15 when  Akshay traditionally  releases his films.

Would the audience accept the neo-Akshay as warmly as  the original?  We will soon know. In  the meanwhile Parmanu’s patriotic pitch wuld have to be determined by KriArj Entertainment  who co-produced  the  film and have now been legally sanctioned to decide how the  film should be sold to the public.

At a  time when A-list actors Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan(in Ali Abbas Zafar’s Bharat) and Mahesh Babu from Telugu cinema in his new  blockbuster release  Bharat Ane Nanu, are playing the patriotic card with such  aplomb, John joining the deshbhakti brigade seems  a bit thick, specially when you remember that  today’s  Parmanu-propelled  Patriot couldn’t even speak the rashtra bhasha when he became  an actor.

Satyamev Jayate!