Amitabh Bachchan was born in Uttar Pradesh, India on October 11, 1942. He is a well-known Indian film actor, film director, film producer, music composer, television host and also a former politician. He was first popular in the early 1970s for movies such as Zanjeer, Deewaar, and Sholay, and was called the “angry young man” because of his role in the Bollywood movie screen.
He has been known as the greatest actor of the century or Big B and has appeared in more than 190 Indian movies for nearly five decades. Bachchan is widely regarded as one of the biggest and most influential actors in Indian film history and world cinema. He dominated the Indian film scene from the 1970s to the 1980s until he was nicknamed by the French director François Truffaut as “one man industry.”
The Indian government honored him by giving Padma Shri in 1984, Padma Bhushan in 2001 and Padma Vibhushan in 2015 for his contribution to the art world. The French government also respected him by awarding the highest civil honor, Knight of the Legion of Honor, in 2007 for his extraordinary career in the movie world. Bachchan also appeared in a Hollywood film, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby where he played a non-Indian Jewish character, Meyer Wolfsheim.
Amitabh Bachchan and His Environmental and Social Concern
Bachchan has been involved with many social missions including donating the US $ 15,000 to remove the debts of 40 besieged farmers in Andhra Pradesh and the US $ 42,000 to pay off the debt of 100 Vidarbha farmers. In 2010, he donated the US $ 15,000 to the Resul Pookutty Foundation for a medical center in Kochi and gave the US $ 3,500 to the family of Delhi police Subhash Chand Tomar who died after sustaining injuries against guerrilla protests after the Delhi gang-rape in 2012.
He founded the Harivansh Rai Bachchan Memorial Trust in collaboration with the Urja Foundation will provide 3,000 homes in India with electricity through solar energy.
Bachchan was UNICEF’s ambassador for the Polio Eradication Campaign in India in 2002. In 2013, he and his family donated the US $ 35,000 to a charity, Plan India, to improve the better life for young girls in India. He also donated the US $ 15,000 to the Maharashtra Police Welfare Fund in 2013.
Amitabh Bachchan and Save Our Tiger Project
The environmental mission includes being the face of the ‘Save Our Tigers’ campaign that promotes the importance of tiger conservation in India. In addition, he supported a campaign by PETA in India to free “Sunder”, a 14-year-old elephant chained and tortured at a temple in Kolhapur, Maharashtra.
In 2014, he recorded his voice and lent his image to the Hindi and English versions of the TeachAIDS software, an international HIV / AIDS prevention education tool developed at Stanford University.
His also concern for climate change in India so he helped launch a partnership between Global Cool and International Indian Film Academy to use the power of film to build awareness of the issue. In addition, he also provided an excavator and tractor to clean the Versova beach to Afroz Shah. Afroz Shah is a young lawyer who cleans Versova’s beach and invites others to do the same thing with his “beach clean-up project” and get a positive response from Amitabh Bachchan.
