Allu Arjun and Atlee's film pre-production works in full swing
A cinematic storm is brewing as Icon Star Allu Arjun joins forces with blockbuster director Atlee for a high-octane pan-India film, currently titled Project A22 x A6. This marks Atlee's much-awaited debut in Telugu cinema and has already ignited massive excitement among fans and cinephiles across the country.
Produced by Sun Pictures and presented by Kalanithi Maran, this ambitious project will be mounted on an international scale, promising a grand visual spectacle. The official announcement video, shot in a Los Angeles studio and featuring Allu Arjun with Atlee and Hollywood technicians, gave audiences a glimpse into the massive scale of the production—hinting at world-class visual effects and storytelling.
Known for delivering blockbuster hits like Jawan, Theri, Bigil, and Mersal, Atlee is now gearing up for an emotional action entertainer that blends Indian values with global appeal. The film is designed to deliver a powerful cinematic experience, combining raw emotions with massy action and lavish visuals.
Pre-production is currently in full swing, with Atlee arriving in Hyderabad on Wednesday for crucial discussions with Allu Arjun. The team is preparing to kick off shooting in June.
Allu Arjun, who recently won the National Award for Best Actor for Pushpa, steps into this new venture with massive expectations. While the full cast and crew details remain under wraps, announcements are expected soon.
This project is shaping up to be a milestone in Indian cinema, signaling a fusion of South Indian star power and globally inspired storytelling.
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From the India Today archives (2011)
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated June 20, 2011)"As I begin to paint, hold the sky in your hands; as the stretch of my canvas is unknown to me."—M.F. Husain With the death of Maqbool Fida Husain in a London hospital on the morning of June 9, India has not only lost her most iconic contemporary artist but also perhaps one of the last living symbols of the very idea of her modern, secular and multicultural nationalism. Born in 1915 at the temple town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra, Husain came from a lower middle class Sulemani Muslim family and rose through the ranks to become India's most famous painter of people, places and a visual artist-especially a mid-20th century modernist painter-Husain was precariously perched on the crest of a nascent and evolving national consciousness. In the post-Partition era, when he first burst on the Indian art scene, Husain became a much celebrated symbol patronised by the Nehruvian state looking to create modernist role models. Yet, that very celebrity made him and his works vulnerable to be hijacked, misrepresented and reviled three decades later by a semi-literate cabal claiming to represent the collective voice of a largely silent Hindu majority. In fact, the torrid love affair between Husain and 'modern secular' India and their eventual dismaying disengagement makes for a civilisational sociologist Veena Das remarks, this "impossible love" had an inherent fragility because the idol, the image and the word are all strongly contested entities. It is also further complicated by the illicit intimacy between history and the 'perception of history' in post-colonial imaginations. The tantalising and tragic relationship-between a nation's notion of the self and Husain's visualisation of it in his art practice-became the vexed terrain over which competing political alignments fought their proxy wars for a good two decades before it eventually led to Husain's self-imposed exile from India in 2006. Four years later, he accepted Qatari nationality, spending his time between Dubai, London and Husain was educated in the streets of Indore, a madrassa in Baroda, the Indore School of Arts and very briefly the J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai. He was an immensely talented and intelligent man with an enormous curiosity about the world who learnt effortlessly from life and people. He arrived in what was then Bombay in the early 1930s, penniless but bursting with enthusiasm and energy, traits that he retained all through his first started out by walking the streets of Bombay offering to paint portraits of people who could afford to pay him Rs 25. There were not too many commissions but some of these early portraits still survive. In 2008 in London, I saw a portrait Husain had done of Lord Ghulam Noon's elder brother in a Bhendi Bazaar sweet shop. Soon, he moved to painting cinema hoardings, first for V. Shantaram's Prabhat Studios and later for New perched high on bamboo scaffolding, Husain learnt to be able to concentrate amid the noise and chaos of the street below. He used to paint 40 foot hoardings for four annas a foot under the blazing sun in Mumbai for many years. From painting hoardings, he progressed to designing toys and painting children's furniture for Rs 300 a month. "But even at that time I knew I would be an artist one day," he used to say, adding, "there was a time when I painted furniture by day and my own art by night. I painted non-stop." Cinema held a life-long fascination for Husain and decades later, he went on to make several much-talked about films. Of these Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival but the most well-known is Gaja Gamini (2000) that featured Madhuri Dixit as his muse. In 2004 he made the semi-autobiographical Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities with Tabu in the lead role which ran into trouble with Muslim life started to change radically around the time of Independence. Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002), the prodigious enfant terrible of Indian art, spotted Husain's talent by chance and immediately included him in his Progressive Artists Group (PAG) in 1947. Husain's work was noticed right from that first showing and with the encouragement of Rudi von Leyden, the German Jewish art critic, he held his first one-man show in Mumbai in 1950. With prices ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 300, the exhibition sold out. As Husain told me with a chuckle, "I was a best seller right from start."advertisementWhat differentiates Husain from his Progressive contemporaries is his deeply rooted 'Indianness' and his celebration of Indian life and people. While his contemporaries were busily assimilating European art from Byzantium downwards, Husain sought inspiration in temple sculptures (Mathura and Khajuraho), Pahari miniature paintings and Indian folk the mid-1950s Husain got national recognition with two very seminal canvases 'Zameen' and 'Between the Spider and the Lamp'. 'Zameen' was inspired by Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (1955) but instead of bemoaning rural poverty and indebtedness, it presents a symbolic celebration of life in rural India with a vibrancy that had never been seen before. "I realised one did not have to paint like Europeans to be modern," he maintained. Nor did he, at any time, understand the angst of existentialism."Alienation as a concept is alien to my nature," he would joke. 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Srivastava struck a deal for 124 Husain paintings for Rs 100 crore; not for love of art but as good investment. Indian art was appreciating at a higher rate than most stocks and brand Husain was now Husain Inc. After his emigration from India, Sheikha Mozah of Qatar was his last great all his fame and wealth, Husain was personally untouched by both. He could be as comfortable in a dhaba as in a five-star hotel relishing an expensive meal. He stopped wearing footwear as a tribute to the Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh in 1974 and he used to walk barefoot into the most exclusive and august gatherings as well as clubs the world epic saga is ever perfect. And Husain had more than his share of controversies and brickbats. However, it is in posterity that Husain's art and persona will get a truer reckoning. Perhaps the best tribute the Indian state could give would be to set up a museum devoted to the life and art of this most talented son of the to India Today Magazine
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