The towering giant of Bollywood – Amitabh Bachchan – turns 79 this October, of which over five decades — half a century — are marked by almost ungraspable fame.

But fame is an inadequate word for what Bachchan has earned in these decades — he has known adulation, worship, power, privilege, reverence; being treated, in the literal sense, like a god, with idols of his image being prayed to; he has become a multi-generational North Star, the unspoken centre of the cinema industry whether he actively participates in it any longer or not.

It is, however, not all that he has accomplished, that might be his most extraordinary feat; it is all that he has bucked, all that he has survived, all the near-misses and almost-failures that he has overcome that are equally extraordinary.

He bucked death itself on the sets of Coolie exactly 40 years ago, exactly halfway through his life thus far, given he will be 80 next year — an accident that brought the full force of Bachchanmania into public view as the country went into a paroxysm of grief, shock and disarray at the prospect of losing one of the few humans to transcend into its pantheon of “gods”. It was on September 24, almost two months after the accident, when he returned home and a nation released its collective breath; even today, social media floods the actor with wishes on August 2, the date of the accident, marking it as his “other birthday”, the day he was “born again’.
He bucked failure, early on in his career but more jaw droppingly, once more at the age of 58 when debt, the utter absence of acting work and the collapse of his entrepreneurial ventures put him into the disorienting position of being a hero, a legend, an icon, a superstar who could inspire people to touch his feet but also had bankruptcy looming. A god with nothing, it seemed, left to give.

And in 2000, he bucked the fabled curse of television when he finally found work that could help pull him out of the morass of financial debt and decided to accept the role of game-show host at Kaun Banega Crorepati. In an interview with journalist Vir Sanghvi, he recounted the circumstances that brought him there. At the peak of his career, he said, someone from his family advised him not to work further and take a rest, which ended up as the worst phase of his life. Writing of that time on his blog, he says "In the year 2000 when the world was celebrating a new century, I was celebrating my disastrous fortune. There were no films, no money, no company, and a million legal cases.”

This time, when told KBC was a huge risk — ‘you’re shrinking yourself from 70 mm to a 25-inch screen,’ friends warned — he decided he had nothing to lose and followed his gut. The rest, as we know, is not merely Bachchan history but television history in this country.

He bucked other, previous failures too; failures so surreal they almost seem like fiction. “After I graduated, someone suggested I become a newsreader so I applied to All India Radio. And I was rejected. I tried in Hindi, too, and was rejected there too,” he told tarun tejpal in an interview at THiNK in 2013.

Stop to think about this. Arguably the most famous Indian voice in history; possibly among the most flawless dictions in Indian public life, was rejected from an audio medium.

It didn’t stop there. “I saw an advertisement in a film magazine for interviews to become an actor, put out by a group of the leading directors of the time, and thought it was the most legitimate way to kick off an acting career. I didn’t know any other way. So I went, but I was rejected right there in the preliminaries for that too,” he told tarun tejpal.

Resilience seems to be in his genes. In response to a question from tarun j tejpal about his parents in the same interview, he said “My parents’ was possibly the first ever inter caste marriage in Allahabad and it caused an uproar. They became virtual social outcasts.”

Doing the unthinkable. Surviving the unsurvivable. Achieving the unachievable. The Bachchan DNA clearly is the stuff of legend.