Bollywood stalwarts felicitated at 46th annual Marathi awards

PUNE - Top Bollywood actor Aamir Khan, veteran actor Rekha and oscar-winner AR Rahman was felicitated at the 46th annual Marathi awards held here last evening.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan presented the prestigious ‘Raj Kapoor awards’ at the Bollywood stalwarts for the special contribution to the Indian cinema.

The award has been named after the legendary film Bollywood personality Raj Kapoor.

Bollywood icon Rekha, who is considered to be one of the evergreen Bollywood actresses, looked as scintillating as ever in Indian traditional drape and thanked the State Government and public for the honour.

Addressing the gathering, Khan thanked the Maharashtra Government for his fame and livelihood and thanked Marathi people for appreciating his work.

“I am extremely happy that the award and the honour has been conferred by Maharashtra which is my motherland. I cannot even express how happy I am,” said Khan.

Khan’s last film ‘Ghajini’ was one of the highest grosser in the year 2008 and was accorded with several awards for his movie based on dyslexia ‘Taare Zameen Par’.is first appearance on the silver screen was as a child actor in his uncle Nasir Hussain’s film ‘Yaadon Ki Baaraat’ way back in 1973.

Oscar award winning music director Rahman was felicitated along with the technical team of ‘Slumdog Millioanire’. He and also sang movie’s award-winning song ‘Jai ho’ on stage.

Child actor Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail was also present at the event.

Rahman fetched two Oscar for rags-to-riches romance about a poor Indian boy competing in a TV game show. The movie scooped eight Academy Awards earlier this year.

Bollywood is worth about 85 billion rupees and is forecast to more than double to 175 billion rupees by 2011.

Despite being so prolific-Bollywood makes more than 800 films a year-the industry’s revenues stand at half of what the Walt Disney studio made in box office revenues in 2006. (ANI)