Purab Ki Laila, Paschim Ka Chaila’. Yes, that’s what the title of the film, twelve years in the making, was. Thankfully, the makers have dropped the embarrassingly cheesy and outdated title and now replaced it with Hello India.
The movie, starring Akshay Kumar, Namrata Shirodkar and Sunil Shetty, has been in the making for more than a decade, but for one reason or another couldn’t be completed, until now, that is.
Akshay, the sport that he is, fully co-operated with the film’s producer-director Shabnam Kapoor and spared a week from his busy schedule to wrap up the film in London recently.
A special song featuring Akshay and singer Hard Kaur was also canned at London’s busy Picadilly Square. It was a Punjabi track with Akshay doing bhangra on London streets. The actor plays a dude from the UK in the movie.
The producer-director could get the permission to shoot at Picadilly Square for just one day. Hard Kaur left her US tour mid-way and flew to London to shoot with Akshay.
“It doesn’t matter whether I am cutting short my tour. We will be dancing on the streets of Picadilly Square,” Hard Kaur told a news agency at the time of the shoot.