London, January 01: The controversy surrounding 3 Idiots has taken a new turn with Chetan Bhagat, the author of Five Point Someone, accusing the filmmakers and actor Aamir Khan of not giving him due credit.
Bhagat said that 70 per cent of the film 3 Idiots is based on his novel Five Point Someone, contradicting Aamir’s claim that he was trying to take away the credit from the film’s scriptwriter, Abhijat Joshi.
“From the very beginning the film has been promoted on the lines that it is based on Five Point Someone but when I saw the film, I found out that my name was nowhere to be seen in the credit line,” Chetan Bhagat told PTI.
Aamir, who plays the lead in the Rajkumar Hirani directed film, had said, “Abhijat has written the script and Raju Hirani worked on it. Raju and Abhijat took the idea from Chetan’s book. The startingpoint is ‘Five Point Someone’, but after that the script has been completely changed.”
But Bhagat has a different take on it, saying that the credit for the story has been given to Abhijat and Hirani while he has been left out entirely.
“For the past two years I have trusted Hirani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Aamir blindly and this is what I get in return. Now I am being threatened with legal action but I am ready for it,” Bhagat said.
Aamir said he had advised Chopra and Hirani to file a case against Bhagat as he has defamed them with “false” allegations.
Reacting to this, Bhagat said, “The film’s setting, characters, dialogues, theme and all the other characteristics have been taken from my book. There are some changes but they were necessary for the book’s adaptation intothe film.”
When asked whether he had tried to talk to Hirani and Chopra on the issue, Bhagat said, “I tried my best but they are not ready to talk.”
Bhagat’s name appears at the film’s end credits. The film, produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra and directed by Hirani has already created box office history by raking in more than Rs 170 crore within days of its release.
–Agencies