How Bollywood has been a bridge between Egypt, India

Over the next few days, India-Egypt bonhomie will be further burnished by a series of bilateral agreements and the diplomatic affability will also reflect in President Abdel

Fattah El-Sisi’s presence as the chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations. But the cultural ties run deeper. Over a swathe of decades in the land of Mo Salah, many

Egyptians have built a personal bond with Hindi films. They have thronged to watch Dilip Kumar’s Aan, gorged on Big B’s Mard on grainy VHS tapes and queued up for Shah Rukh Khan’s

My Name is Khan in Cairo. It isn’t just the people, even presidents have loved Hindi cinema. Not many know that Egypt’s (then) President Gamal Abdel Nasser attended the 7th

Filmfare Awards in Bombay in 1960. 97265055 The attraction is mutual. Bollywood too has been fascinated by Egypt’s landscape and monuments, especially the pyramids.

From Bachchan in The Great Gambler (1976) to Akshay Kumar in Singh is Kinng (2008) – Hindi cinema’s biggest and brawniest have bashed up baddies and shimmied to songs

there. Ancient as the two civilizations are, shared anti-colonial objectives have crafted modern associations between Egypt and India. The Union ministry of external affairs

said in 2014 that Mahatma Gandhi and Egyptian statesman Saad Zaghloul had common goals on independence of their countries. The ties were elevated by the close friendship between

Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru, leading to a Friendship Treaty between the two nations in 1955. Nasser and Nehru, along with Yugoslavia’s Josif Broz Tito, were regarded as the three

pillars of the global Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).