Jacqueline requests to respect her privacy

The actress is going through a rough time — her mother has had a heart stroke, and now private pictures of her have been leaked

Jacqueline Fernandez has requested media to not circulate pictures which intrude her privacy after a new image of her with alleged conman Sukesh Chandrashekhar went viral. On late Saturday evening, an intimate picture of the 36-yearold actor with Chandrashekhar surfaced on the Internet. Fernandez, whose mother reportedly suffered a heart stroke earlier this week in Bahrain, wrote, “This country and its people have always given me tremendous love and respect. This includes my friends from the media, from whom I have learned a lot. I’m currently going through a rough patch but I’m sure that my friends and fans will see me through it. It is with this trust that I would request my media friends to not circulate images of a nature that intrude my privacy and personal space. You would not do this to your own loved ones, am sure you would not do this to me either. Hoping that justice and good sense prevails. Thank you,” the Sri Lankan actor said in the statement —

A little over two weeks after his much awaited film 83 released theatrically, filmmaker Kabir Khan describes his headspace as a ‘mixed bag’. While he is happy that the cricket drama has received unprecedented love, the film failed to translate the glowing reviews into BO numbers. Khan described the film ‘a victim of the pandemic’, and said 83 has put up the numbers despite battling COVID-19 restrictions, 50 per cent theatrical occupancy in key states and the complete closure of cinema halls in Delhi and Haryana.

“I feel exhilarated to have created this film which has received so much love but at the same time there is a disappointment that not everybody who wants to watch it can see it today because the pandemic is there with historic numbers. We nurtured the film for two years, waited for the correct time so that everybody gets to see it on the big screen. But with this pandemic, one can never get it right.

He states that they did not know how the explosion (of cases) would literally take place on the day of our release day — December 24. “It was just sad,” Khan said. The director said 48 hours prior to the release, the team got an indication that things could go “spiralling out of control”, but it was too late for them to react, so they went ahead keeping their fingers crossed.

A day after the film opened, Gujarat, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh announced a night curfew, which Khan said impacted the night shows of the film. Within four days, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal announced the closure of cinema halls.

Several

others

states

followed suit and capped the theatrical occupancy at 50 per cent. Khan said the severity of

COVID-19 kept the team on tenterhooks as they would wake up everyday and wonder, “Ok, now what has shut down?”

“So many people loved the film, so naturally one has to question what went wrong, and what went wrong is the pandemic. There was no chance to fight back. The pandemic is not just about theatres shutting down but also this psyche. The mindset (of stepping out) can change overnight.”

While the audience reception to the film was overwhelmingly positive, Khan feels there was an ‘agenda’ with which the trade reported figures of 83 by completely eliminating the impact of the pandemic.

“The film is a victim of the pandemic.

How can you report the figures without the context, that there is a raging pandemic out there?” the 53-yearold filmmaker asked.

“You are comparing us to other films which were released in nonCOVID normal times, and this is a film that has been hit hard by

COVID on a daily basis, because we are losing hundreds of theatres a n d screens.

Despite that we have touched

`180 crore globally” he pointed out.

While 83 has underperformed at the box office, the trade has hailed Allu Arjunstarrer Pushpa: The Rise as a bonafide blockbuster, with its Hindi version clocking more than `74 crore.

Khan said Pushpa had collected `26 crore from its Hindi version in the first week, when everything was functional. “We didn’t even have the chance to enjoy a restrictionfree run. Everyone now knows that December 26 is when it all came crashing down, when we realised we are in the middle of a third wave. What is the amount of money they (Pushpa) made before that and what is the amount of money they made after that? Of course, they kept continuing but at levels much lower than us,” he added.

Kabir stresses that they did not even have the chance to fight. He asks that when reporting BO numbers people conveniently forgot to mention about the pandemic, and this to him, sounds completely weird. “It was an erroneous reporting which is unforgivable. It smells of agenda and bad professionalism.”