Bollywood fascinated with Chandni Chowk

Delhi’s Chandni Chowk has become a favourite hotspot for Bollywood filmmakers.Just a few weeks back we saw Ajay Devgan hopping terrace-to-terrace and chasing criminals on the labyrinthine streets in the congested locality of Chandni Chowk in Rohit Shetty’s film Sunday .
Similarly, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra gave us a glimpse of the back alleys of Chandni Chowk in his acclaimed film Rang De Basanti . Now, he is making a film entirely based in Chandni Chowk.Dilli 6 is Mehra’s autobiographical recount of the days he spent in Chandni Chowk as a youth. However, Mehra is not shooting the film in Chandni Chowk due to practical reasons. Shootings in Chandni Chowk usually attracts huge crowds that make it difficult for the film’s crew to work. That is why Mehra has got a set depicting Chandni Chowk erected in Jaipur. It is there he has been shooting this biopic with Abhishek Bachchan and Sonam Kapoor .On the other hand, Akshay Kumar will be seen in a film titled ‘Chandni Chowk To China’, which has a story much similar to Akshay’s real life. Akshay grew up in Chandni Chowk before he went to Bangkok to work as a cook. In the film, previously titled Made In China , Akki plays a cook in Chandni Chowk who goes to China to learn martial arts and returns to Mumbai to make a place for himself in the showbiz. In the last few weeks, director Nikhil Advani was shooting the film in the crowded streets of Chandni Chowk, which, the director says, carry “a unique old-world charm”.In fact Akshay still keeps in touch with his childhood friends in the locality and he also has an ancestral home there.While it may still be many months before ‘Chandni Chowk to China’ makes it to the theatres, the old Delhi’s beauty has been recreated by none other than Subhash Ghai in his upcoming film Black And White , which is set to release in early March.The film stars Anurag Sinha as an undercover terrorist who comes to Chandni Chowk for a secret suicide mission to be carried on Red Fort on Independence Day. Anil Kapoor plays a professor of Urdu living in Chandni Chowk with his social activist wife. Set almost completely in Chandni Chowk, ‘Black and White’ tackles the issue of terrorism with a message of communal harmony. Ghai is departing from his usual masala entertainers with this realistic film that raises pertinent questions of the day.Ghai says Chandni Chowk is central to his film’s story because it signifies the unity in diversity.Rightly said, Mr. Ghai.