Ahaan Panday's Father Chikki Panday Once Bailed Shah Rukh Khan Out Of Jail
Ahaan Panday has finally stepped into the spotlight with his debut film, Saiyaara, a romance drama backed by Yash Raj Films. With his nuanced portrayal of an artist in the film, the star in making is all set to make his mark in the entertainment industry. Ahaan's debut has also put a spotlight on his father, Chikki Panday, who is close friends with big Bollywood names like Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan.
As per a Hindustan Times report, Chikki Panday once even bailed Shah Rukh Khan out of jail. As per the report, in 1994, Shah Rukh was arrested for threatening a journalist who had written a magazine article defaming him. SRK was held in custody, and Chikki Panday and actor Nana Patekar were the ones who bailed him out.
Chikki Panday, whose real name is Aloke Sharad Panday, is Chunky Panday's younger brother. He is a businessman and philanthropist who prefers to stay away from the limelight. Chikki Panday is among Shah Rukh Khan's best friends in Mumbai and has helped him in the early days of his career. SRK and Gauri frequently visited Chikki's house, watched video cassettes, and spent time there in the superstar's early struggling days.
Their friendship went beyond generations as Ahaan Panday is also a friend of Aryan Khan. Now, as Ahaan has left everyone impressed with his acting debut in Saiyaara, all eyes are on Aryan Khan's directorial debut.
Bollywood is no stranger to grand debuts, but when the son of Shah Rukh Khan steps into the director's chair, expectations soar to an entirely new level. Aryan Khan's first project, Ba***ds of Bollywood, has already created waves with its unique premise, sharp humour, and a cast packed with some of the biggest names in Indian cinema. Bollywood's biggest superstars—Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Aamir Khan—are all making cameos, adding a layer of nostalgia and meta-humour to the show. Ranbir Kapoor, Ranveer Singh, and Alia Bhatt also feature as themselves, embracing Bollywood's self-referential culture.
Produced by Red Chillies Entertainment, Ba***ds of Bollywood is more than just another web series—it's a deep dive into the chaotic, glamorous, and unpredictable world of Hindi cinema, told through a sharp-witted lens. According to insiders, Netflix and the production house have meticulously planned a grand release for the show.
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The Theatre of Ratan Thiyam: Profound Beauty on the Modern Stage
I remember Ratan Thiyam, almost always dressed in black, performing an elaborate curtain call along with his actors at the end of his show. Together they would all go down on their knees and touch their foreheads to the stageboards so as to thank the audience for coming to the performance. The grace of this gesture in some sense encoded the essence of Ratan's theatre work – its formal rigour and its elegance as it walked the fine line between performance and secular ritual for, and of, the modern stage. One the most celebrated theatre makers of India, Ratan Thiyam, who passed on July 23, 2025, in Imphal at the age of 77, was in command of many roles at one and the same time throughout his life. He was a theatre director of brilliance, but was also a writer and a poet, a theatre teacher, a guru, a distinguished organiser and a leader – heading institutions like the National School of Drama as its Director (1987–88) and as its Chairperson (2013–17), while creatively shaping the artistic style of the renowned Chorus Repertory Company that has performed across India and the world to great acclaim for more than four decades. However, let me begin this tribute to Ratan by taking a step sideways. It is said that there is a philosophical connection between landscape artists, horticulturalists and theatre makers. All of them understand the effects of a slant of light, the depth of shadow, grades of colour, chiaroscuro, and the inter-relationships, by placement, between nature, humans and objects. I had the occasion several years ago to visit the Chorus Repertory Company, located at the edges of Imphal city, and I vividly remember the nearly three-acre site: the neatly trimmed hedges, the small pond, the clusters of trees with blossoming vines wrapped around their trunks, the flower beds, the vegetable patch, and the gravelly pathways connecting one part to another. The vegetables harvested from the fields fed everyone who lived on site including Ratan. He lovingly introduced the garden, the water body and the plants, many of which he had planted himself. Also read: Ratan Thiyam, the Risks He Took and the Future of Indian Theatre Working the land was a part of the daily routine set up several decades before the connections between agricultural activity and theatre practice had come into focus, as they have done now. Apart from this there was, and still is, another routine in place – of practising movement, breath, vocalisation, song and music derived from the vocabularies of Manipuri dance traditions, martial arts and ritual practices. This training happened in a cluster of buildings set amidst the landscape, that included an exhibition space, a rehearsal space, and a blackbox theatre equipped with light and sound systems. Away from the noise of the city, the Chorus Repertory as imagined by Ratan functions as a sort of ashram, where skill is transferred to the shishya – student – on a daily and continual basis, a mode of transmission different from the segmented time-tables of 'modern' theatre training institutes. But back to the theatre maker and the horticulturalist, and their understanding of atmosphere – which is objective and subjective, material and non-material, at the same time; something that you can breathe in and recognise it to be joy or peace or melancholy for instance, but not know what it is that you have drawn into your lungs. Ratan's use of light and shadow in theatre is unparalleled. He was able to create degrees of darkness on the stage – experienced as sometimes dense and sometimes diffuse with a precision that requires an exact understanding of the properties of lighting apparatus. At one moment the lights dimmed so low that you might see nothing but the glint of sequins on the potloi (the structured skirt worn by Manipuri dancers) as a group of performers glide across the stage; at another moment you might see a slash of light illuminate fingers wrists and upper arms flickering against the cyclorama – leaves, insects or distress signals from a drowning chorus? From the dark upstage you might see a tall, white fabric umbrella, held firmly by an actor, float downstage, to form a halo ─ marking a passage to the heavens? The tumultuous clang and flash of hand-held gongs deafen and blind the spectators as the chakravyuh gains the velocity of a tornado in a circle of red beams. And who can forget the often-cited image of an elephant materialising on stage as if in a dream, in his memorable production of Agyeya's Uttarapriyadarshi! These are stage effects that cause the heart to pound. Almost nobody understood the magic of the image in theatre better than Ratan Thiyam. And almost nobody used the proscenium arch theatre, also known as the picture-frame stage, better than him. The picture-frame stage, brought to India by the British to house their theatricals, has given rise to much debate. The proscenium, as we know, is the architectural frame that edges the opening of the stage. The major experiential convention it produces is a play of dark and light; the stage being illumined while the audience is in darkness is as much an emotional experience as it is material. What effect does such architectural framing have on traditional forms and their grammars? How does it change our viewing habits and our expectations? Ratan Thiyam's work, performed primarily in the proscenium, disturbs assumptions and generates a contradiction. Even when he remodelled traditional grammars, and reshaped gestures drawn from Manipuri martial arts and dance forms so as to align them with the enclosing edges of the frame, Ratan produced performances that have often been understood as, or even become synonymous with, Indian theatre. A description that we must inflect, gloss and interrogate by keeping his remodelling, his refashioning of form stance and music in mind. Ratan Thiyam's luminous stage work exceeds description; what stays in our memory is his love for the craft of theatre, and the beauty it can produce. It reminds us that meaning-making in theatre is not by word alone but by all the elements that make up the performance – from minutiae such as glinting sequins and flying tassels on costume, to the voluminosity of shadowed tableaus and grand battles choreographed to thunderous percussion that judder the very foundations of the auditorium. Our homage to Ratan Thiyam: the person who ignited the spell of material fiction that is theatre; the one whose aesthetic and pedagogical imagination enhanced the discourse of modern Indian theatre.
