No more jinxed: Swastik to shoot Mahabharat's pilot

It seems like the jinx has finally ended for Star Plus as it is heard that Swastik Pictures Mahabharat may now take-off. It’s been quite some time since the epic changed hands. And now it appears that the wait is over as the production house is all set to shoot the pilot of the mythological show in the fourth week of April. The channel had earlier roped in Bobby Bedi and Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s Kaleidoscope to produce the mytho but the project was aborted and the two parties parted ways on a bitter note. Informs a source from Swastik Pictures, “We are all set to shoot the pilot of Mahabharat in the fourth week of April. Everything is in place now and the actual shoot will commence in two months’ time. We are currently location hunting. The pilot is actually a special episode for an internal analysis. We want to check the language, technicality and the quality of the show. Initially we did suffer some complications as the actors we approached didn’t want to do it. They feared that acting in a mytho would bracket them. But now things are looking up and most of the faces signed on for the show are relatively new.” Apparently, it’s been heard that popular actor Kunal Verma and actress Adita Wahi too were approached to do the show but the former refused it. Wahi has however neither refused nor accepted the show. She asked us to speak to the production house but when prodded further she said, ‘Yes, I was approached by the production house for a role. I am not clear as to what role they have in mind. I am clueless where it stands now as neither have I reverted to them nor have they called me again.” We also sent a text message to producer Siddharth Tewary but he remained unavailable.