- Monday, January 13, 2025
By: PTI
To express their love and admiration for Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan, an Indian-American family has come up with an out-of-the-box idea and installed a life-size statue of their “God” outside their home in the Edison City of New Jersey, the US.
Some 600 people gathered outside the house of Rinku and Gopi Sheth in Edison, often called ‘Little India’ for being home to a significantly large Indian-American population, when the statue was formally unveiled by eminent community leader Albert Jasani.
The status is placed inside a large glass box.
The ceremony was accompanied by the bursting of fire-crackers and an impromptu dance by a fan club of the 79-year-old Indian superstar.
“He is nothing less than a God to me and my wife,” Gopi Sheth, who is an internet security engineer, told Press Trust of India.
“The biggest thing that inspires me about him is not only his reel life, but also the real-life ? how he manages himself in public, how he conveys and communicates everything you know. He is very down-to-earth. He takes care of his fans. He is not like so many other stars. This is why I thought I should have his status outside of my house,” Sheth said about the 79-year-old.
Sheth, who arrived in the US from Dahod in eastern Gujarat in 1990, has been running www.BigBEFamily.com, a website for “Big B Extended Family”, for the past three decades.
The website, among other things, he said is a repository of the global fans of Amitabh Bachchan. The database is shared with the superstar.
According to Sheth, Bachchan is aware of the statue.
Sheth said the superstar told him he does not deserve this kind of treatment, but did not stop him from doing so.
The life-size statue in which shows Bachchan seated in his ?Kaun Banega Crorepati? mode was specially designed and made in Rajasthan and then shipped to the United States. The entire project, Sheth said, cost him more than $75,000 (about Rs 60 lakh).
Sheth said he first met “his God” during Navaratri celebrations in New Jersey in 1991.
Since then he has been a big fan. He said he has been compiling the database of his fans in the US and globally which later turned into a website. “Bachchan Saheb calls his fans and supporters as his extended family,” he said.
“Installing a statue in the US comes with a lot of challenges and this was more difficult than others,” Sheth said.
