#ByInvitation: The Importance of being Amitabh Bachchan

There are only three things India agrees on without a fight: mangoes in summer, cricket in winter, and Amitabh Bachchan all year round.The importance of being Amitabh is not that he is a star. Rather, he is still ‘the’ star, in a country where idols fade faster than political manifestos.Let’s start with ‘that’ voice. In a land where people argue whether Hindi is a language or an occupation, his baritone arrived like God’s push notification, a constitutional amendment. You could put it on the loudspeaker at any polling booth, and 90 crore voters would line up in alphabetical order. But beneath the velvet bass was a tectonic shift. India had been whispering through the Nehruvian 50s, humming through the Rajesh Khanna 70s.

Amitabh didn’t hum. He thundered. And in doing so, he gave a generation permission to clench its jaw without apology.When Salim-Javed scripted the ‘angry young man,’ they weren’t creating a character. They were outsourcing the frustrations of a nation to one six-foot-two man with collapsing lungs and impeccable cheekbones. Unemployment, corruption, daddy issues with the State – a single Friday release with Bachchan punching a corrupt neta saved India’s collective blood pressure for a year.

Over the years, as telegrams turned to Instagram, from smugglers to politicians to start-up bros with Series C funding, Amitabh glided across decades like the Yamuna pretending to be a river. Sometimes shallow, sometimes in full flood, but never absent.In fact, he has reinvented himself more times than yoga poses at an Iyengar class. Think brooding hero, bankrupt producer, failed MP, quiz show host, meme philosopher.

Even his failures became lessons. When ABCL went down, it taught middle-class India: don’t give personal guarantees to your own company. That’s financial literacy in 70mm.Unlike most stars who go down with their hairstyles, Amitabh kept rebooting. Not to something new, but to himself. And somehow, everything he touched became the benchmark. A hairstyle became an industry. A pause in dialogue delivery became a syllabus.

Even his alleged affairs are remembered with the same gravitas as his National Awards. Dissected not as a scandal but as footnotes. In a country addicted to argument, Amitabh is the pause button. The one consensus where Stephens boys and vernacular college kids, rich and poor, North and South, men and women, all briefly nod in the same rhythm. For a country obsessed with fathers, Gandhiji, Nehruji, Netaji, and every second Bollywood dialogue, Amitabh became the premium subscription version.

He scolded like a father (Agneepath), protected like a father (Shakti), and occasionally disappointed like a father (his politics). He was the man who reminded you to sit straight, but also the one you wanted to watch with your legs dangling in the balcony’s front row.Today, at 82, he tweets with erratic capitalisation, blogs with daily updates, and Instagrams folded-hands emojis like QR codes for blessings. Sometimes it makes sense, often it doesn’t.

But we don’t read him for sense. We read him for presence. When Bachchan writes “Ef” for “extended family,” we nod like obedient relatives, though we’ve never met him and never will. His importance isn’t coherence. It’s continuity.Here’s the paradox. In a culture that burns its gods as quickly as its firecrackers, Amitabh has survived half a century of collective impatience. He has been worshipped, mocked, bankrupted, resurrected, memed, trolled, and yet, he exists.

That is his biggest role. To outlast the trends, the Khans, the streaming wars, the IPL seasons.So, what is the importance of being Amitabh Bachchan? It is permanence in a temporary nation. A pulse that keeps returning when the ECG of a billion hearts seems flat. A reminder that in a noisy, impatient, argumentative country, endurance itself can be art. Simply surviving, with grace and gravel in equal measure, is revolutionary.Because Amitabh is not just a man, not just a star. He is the comma between our chaos, the pause between our arguments, the ellipsis in our unfinished story.The importance of being Amitabh Bachchan is not that he will live forever.It is that when he speaks, for a moment, so do we.