At last it can be told!

The Jackie Shroff Exposé!

---

Quite frankly, it hurts me that Planet BollyBob is not taken seriously -- or even recognized -- by the glamorous world of Bollywood movers & shakers. Why don't they care? Sometimes when I lie awake at night listening to my upstairs neighbours having sex between 10:35 and 10:45pm, I imagine that Shah Rukh Khan is laughing and pointing at me. Which I suppose is better than having him stalk me, but it's still not a very nice feeling, especially coming from somebody like Shah Rukh Khan.

Basically, I've been feeling like a little fish in the big Bollywood pond. And we know what happens to little fish in the big Bollywood pond...they get eaten up by those enormous snapping turtles that they dumped in there to dispose of all of the bodies. Not even Minnie Mathur wants to talk to me. I finally realized that what I really need in order to make Planet BollyBob a force to be reckoned with is to reveal some exclusive gossip about the stars, and that's why I'm coming clean about my relationship with "Jackie Shroff" last year. At that time I'd made brief comments about an email I received from him -- and how weird it was -- but since I didn't want to make fun of him or invade his privacy I refused to reveal the word-for-word contents of the email (no matter how many times people wrote to me wanting to know what he said) (Minnie never did, incidentally).

I don't know why I was being so darn moral. I was a different person then. After spending a few months with Jackie as my MSN Buddy and watching him change aliases faster than Sridevi changes outfits, I've now decided to let the dhole out of the bag and give you evidence that either Jackie Shroff is deranged, or I'm MSN Buddies with somebody who is only pretending to be Jackie Shroff (and who is, yes, deranged).

First off, here's the story about the original email. I sent him a rather nice 500+ word letter about how much I enjoyed his films, how cool it was for him to bring Bollywood to the net, and how nice it was to post his email address on his website. Let me state once again that I said nothing creepy, except for an off-the-cuff joke about his funny dancing in Rangeela. Here -- for the first time ever! -- is the full text of the email he sent back to me. See what you think:

This email confused me. I'm less confused now since I've had time to decode it, but it's all still a little baffling. Let's take a few seconds to look closely at it.

First off, I wonder what he meant by "long time no hear," since I'd never written to him before. Where did I know Jackie from? Was he just being polite, or did we really meet a long time ago when I was a child? Was he the shaggy-haired anonymous millionaire who I used to pretend would give me a bicycle one day on the way home from school? Probably not, since I didn't know anything about Jackie Shroff back then, so I couldn't have pretended it was him. So, the chances of Jackie and I being acquainted before this email were non-existant...he couldn't have even been in my imagination before I sent him my email.

Next: no, I hadn't seen Yaadein and I hadn't planned on seeing it. I didn't want to admit it to myself at the time but Jackie was just plugging his film.

As if this wasn't bad enough, he followed up his plug with a commercial for some "Video On Demand" scheme, where no-doubt we'd be asked to pay to watch Jackie Shroff dance in his bikini briefs on some low-bandwidth webcam, meanwhile clicking madly to get rid of all the banners advertising a new Jackie Shroff ayurvedic cream. Or maybe not, I haven't looked into "Video On Demand," but I don't think I'm up for it.

"Rest all cool," was how the letter ended. Which is nice I guess...this means "everything else is cool," or I'm being told to "take a very cool rest," either way it's not offensive.

I don't remember if I responded to this email or not, but I did make sure to include Jackie as one of my MSN buddies, where I was delighted to see him list his hobby in his profile as "cooking cars." When I first made him my buddy, Jackie was using his own name as his alias. But then his alias started changing. Every day Jackie was using a new name, like "50/50" or "jagu ar" or "tiger" or "Bang Galore," which I asked him about -- the only time we ever engaged in instant messaging. The conversation went like this:

Since I haven't been invited to any swanky wrap parties for the latest Bollywood adaptation of "Forrest Gump" or "The Evil Dead" (AKA Raat), this Jackie Shroff expose is the best I can do for an exclusive scoop. Maybe it seems kind of sad and passive. But just remember this: if it's someday revealed that Jackie Shroff is actually a puppet for his young daughter Krishna, who writes all of his emails and hijacks his MSN Messenger account and actually cooks his cars (or, worse, cooks cars that don't even belong to her family, which would be a real scandal worth reporting)...please keep in mind that I found out about it first and I wasn't afraid to tell the world. Even though Jackie frightens me.

I'd like to end off comparing my behaviour in this article to a list of things Jackie hates, just to prove I haven't done anything wrong:

In his own words:	How I measure up:
I hate gosspping.	Well, okay.
I hate people who are liars, who gossip about others and who are always back-biting.	Wow, he really doesn't like gossip. Sorry, Jackie.
I certainly dislike people disturbing me at my residence in the evenings!!!	I've never done this!

 

---