Amitabh Bachchan is one of a kind, the biggest star Hindi cinema has seen. His is a success story straight out of fairy tale. After 12 flops, an unsung film called Zanjeer hit the screen in 1973, to dramatically divert the course of Hindi cinema. In a phenomenal sweep, he overtook every star in sight, including the then ‘phenomenon’, Rajesh Khanna, to give stardom a new dimension.

Curiously, there was nothing in Bachchan's first 12 films to portend the kind of megastar he was going to be. He didn’t have the conventional good looks of a Hindi film hero. He was tall and gawky, and very clumsy in his demeanour. If Zanjeer hadn’t clicked the way it did, he would have perhaps opted to play villainous roles as he had done in Parwana, where his performance in a negative role had won raves. Experts in the industry had begun suggesting that his looks were better suited for villainous roles. But destiny willed otherwise. Zanjeer, a film rejected by the likes of Dev Anand, Dharmendra, Raaj Kumar and Jeetendra, not only changed Bachchan’s destiny, but the course of Hindi cinema as well. The mega hits that followed Zanjeer, like Deewar, Trishul, Majboor, Kabhi Kabhie, Sholay, Amar Akbar Anthony and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar shot him to a height that no Indian actor before him had scaled. Only seven out of his 70-odd films that followed Zanjeer (1973) had lost money at the box-office. It was an incredible spell. And it led to the entire process of filmmaking in Mumbai being subordinated to the persona of one actor, who, as Ramesh Sippy once put it, “had become a one-man variety show”. In a tribute to the phenomenon, the leading news magazine, India Today, had aptly described the Hindi film industry of the time as a "one-man industry".

In a sensational decade from 1975 t0 1985, Bachchan dominated Hindi cinema like no one before him.  Like the maxim goes, all that goes up has to come down. Bachchan’s climb down began with a near fatal accident on the sets of Manmohan Desai's film Coolie in 1982. It eventually culminated in the mega star moving into politics in the mid-80s at the behest of his friend Rajeev Gandhi, the then Prime Minister. He did come back after a brief, chequered spell in politics, but on a disappointing note. He suddenly seemed to have gone out of sync with the goings-on in the film industry. The rules had changed, so had the men who called the shots. The films he made with old faithfuls like Manmohan Desai and Prakash Mehra flopped at the box office. Even a new generation whiz kid like Mukul Anand, who made three significant films with Bachchan (Agneepath -1990, Hum-1991 and Khuda Gawah - 1992), could not recreate the old magic of the mega star. However, the ‘star of the millennium’ wasn’t done yet. After a long sabbatical, he made a dramatic entry into the small screen and revolutionised it beyond recognition just as he had to the big screen in the 70s. The game show, Kaun Banega Karorpati? (KBC), caused an unprecedented upheaval on the small screen to change equations overnight.

The sensational turn around gave a new lease to his film career as well. It inevitably led to a more creative spell unhindered by image hassles, resulting in some outstanding work as in Dev, Black, Sarkar, Eklavya, Baghbaan and Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. His performance in Black won him the National Award for Best actor in 2005. The magic continues as the Big B plays a Sexy Sam and does a ‘Kajra re…’, with no sign of saying Alvida...