As India Struggles With Coronavirus, Bollywood’s Biggest Star Tests Positive

NEW DELHI — When India’s largest star, Amitabh Bachchan, introduced on Saturday evening that he had contracted the coronavirus, this nation was shattered.

Mr. Bachchan, often known as Massive B, shouldn’t be merely an enormously profitable actor. He’s one in every of India’s most revered figures. His face and wealthy, avuncular voice, dripping with gravitas, are all over the place, deployed in advertisements for family merchandise, voice-overs at museums and numerous public service campaigns. He was lately roped into doing a marketing campaign on — what else? — the coronavirus.

With India getting walloped by the virus, Mr. Bachchan, 77, was nonetheless at it, attempting to carry India’s spirits from what gave the impression to be his hospital room in a short video that was broadly circulating on Sunday morning.

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“They’re attempting instances,” he says, showing within the video with a white medical band tightly wrapped round his head. “Everyone seems to be being labored to their absolute limits. There may be at all times worry. Maybe despair.”