Amitabh Bachchan once shared an anecdote from the shoot of Pukar (1983), which involved him washing the feet of a crying Kareena Kapoor, and trying to convince her that he is not ‘evil’. He wrote about this incident on his blog in 2013.
Young Kareena was ‘very disturbed’ when she saw him beating up her father Randhir Kapoor while filming an action sequence, Amitabh wrote in his blog post. Kareena held tightly on to Randhir to ‘protect’ him from Amitabh’s blows.
“I was narrating to her (Kareena), one such moment when we were shooting for Pukar in Goa and how she looked with her cute summer hat with little pink flowers on them, and how troubled she had been when during an action sequence I was hitting her father. She, in her innocence, had run on to the set in the outdoors and clung to her father to protect him from this ‘evil’ man who was beating him up,” he wrote.
Amitabh talked about how Kareena seemed to have warmed up to him a little after he washed her feet. “In tears and most worried, she was relentless and very disturbed. She soiled her pretty little feet in the sand and in order to settle her down I had asked for some water and washed her tiny feet clean, to make her realise that this act was not for real but an enactment. I think after the feet washing, her opinion seemed to have changed about me. I wasn’t that ‘evil’ after all! She still remembers that moment,” he wrote.
In 2019, Amitabh shared a picture of Kareena crying on the sets of Pukar and him attending to her injured foot. “Guess who…? That be Kareena Kapoor on the sets of PUKAR shooting in Goa… had come with dad Randhir… hurt her foot… and yours truly putting medication and taping it,” he wrote.
Amitabh and Kareena have since worked together in films such as Dev, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Satyagraha. She also made her big-screen debut alongside his son, Abhishek Bachchan, in JP Dutta’s Refugee (2000).