When a Bollywood star publicly beat up a heroine to please his wife

Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. We all know that by now. But we don’t really know why. I think the primary reason was to please his wife. Think of what she would have had to say to her husband if they had gone home without Will having done anything after Chris’ public humiliation of his wife.

Some such impulse drove a star of the 1960s and 1970s to thrash a screen diva of the 1970s in full public view. The two of them were intensely in love and when he turned director she even invested a huge amount of money in his dream project besides playing the lead, free of fee, of course.

Then the Male Star decided to end the relationship with the Female Superstar. Why? Because his wife, not one to take her husband’s extra-marital adventures lying down, put her foot down. The Male Star had no choice but to call off his relationship with the Female Star with immediate effect.

He stopped meeting her, taking her calls.

Distraught and unable to process the sudden brutal and selfish rejection, the Female Superstar followed the Male Superstar and his wife to a party at a posh hotel where she confronted him. What followed next left the august gathering stunned.

The Male Superstar, from a family of hotblooded Pathan he-men, dragged the Female Superstar down to the ground and thrashed her with hands, feet, and his wife’s heavy purse. The wife too joined in and hit the Female Star on her face repeatedly with her purse while the Female Star screamed in pain and humiliation.

The incident left the Female Superstar, quite a hip and happening lady known to be ahead of her times, with a permanently damaged eye which does not close fully to this day.

As she told me many years later, “It wasn’t so much the physical pain but the public humiliation that left me stunned. It took me many years to get over the shock. But the pain is still with me.”

The lengths people go to, to please their wives.