Like a hologram the legend of Amitabh Bachchan hovers over the flesh and blood Bachchan. And as the hologram, sometimes mocking, sometimes cajoling, gets bigger -- even more ominous with its intimations of immortality -- the man himself on today's stage of screen and life shrinks.

The two, the legend and the man, seem to be going their separate ways. It wasn't too long ago that the actor whose decade-and-a-half reign over Indian cinema after Zanzeer and Sholay in 1975 was really taken as a God off screen.

His writ went beyond the Indian diaspora. Cairo airport became a danger zone a few years ago when a horde of Egyptian women wanted a bit of Bachchan -- so much so that immigration formalities had to be handled in his hotel and fundamentalists expressed their wrath over the way the women had behaved. In Afghanistan during the filming of Khudah Gawah, the late president Najibullah provided the film team almost half the Afghan air force as escort -- in exchange for lots of photographs with him. Even the Mujahideen weren't untouched by the Bachchan charisma.

Back home in India when the actor hovered between life and death in Breach Candy Hospital after Puneet Issar hit him during the filming of Coolie in 1982, the nation held its breath. Bachchan also caught the literary imagination of writers. Salman Rushdie used his persona -- and screen lover Rekha's too -- in The Satanic Verses, novelists Shashi Tharoor and Shobha De incorporated him in their fiction.

Little did the movie moguls who turned away the 27-year-old gawky colossus who approached them in Mumbai in 1969 realise that Bachchan was to rewrite cinematic history. He was too thin, had legs which went on endlessly and sunken eyes. In fact, he was all packed and ready to go back to Calcutta where he had worked as an executive in Bird and Co when some friends and Jaya, then Bhaduri, pulled the brooding actor stringing his guitar out of his flat and partied the night away on Juhu Beach. He missed his train and stayed on. It took 13 films and Prakash Mehra's Zanzeer before he got a hit.

But Bachchan, the one-man industry, changed the way the film world did business: crores were to ride on his sloping shoulders. He changed the concept of the hero. Even of the heroine: actresses were reduced to moving props while he incarnated the nation's anger and frustration on screen. Villains were never to be the same again either. . Bachchan needed the presence of an actor like Amjad Khan to represent the negative forces so that he could act out his avenging-angel screen personas. The actor even usurped the role of the comedians: whether it was the dancing hijra number Mere Angan Me in Lawaris or his unforgettable Antony Gonzalves monologue in Amar Akbar Antony.

The off-screen persona has not been any less omnipresent. Bachchan turned himself into a brand equity and became the Rs 10 crore man. As the last reel of the millennium unspools, Bachchan's even been chosen the actor of the millennium in a BBC poll.

What is so special about the man? There have been other actors as good or better: Naseeruddin Shah, Sanjeev Kumar and of course Dilip Kumar, the thespian, the actor's actor. But with the advent of Bachchan the action hero came into being. He represented the oppressed.

The late '70s were ripe for this kind of screen messiah. The Jayaprakash Narayan movement and Emergency fired the imagination of the youth and shook the foundations of the existing order. There was disillusionment in the air. People were looking for a hero who did not turn his other cheek. This public school-educated actor who had done quite a bit of English theatre in his Calcutta days was to inhabit the tapori persona and speak his street smart language. His terrain: the urban jungle red in tooth and chawl.

When actor Iftekar in Deewar throws a coin at a shoe shine boy -- the child Bachchan returns it, saying, "I'm working, not begging." The young boy's defiant attitude to ask for his rights struck the right note. Bachchan's anger was against the system, against his birth. Initially it was, as Javed Akhtar says, "an anger with grace, an anger which hurts and has tears". Revenge became the big theme.

By the mid-'80s Bachchan began to repeat himself: he became a caricature of the vintage Bachchan, an actor trapped in his own image. Directors were reluctant to exploit his versatility and range: the intensity and depth of feeling he brought to films like Saudagar, Mili, Abhimaan has few parallels. The angry young man became the angry middle-aged man. The penultimate decade of the millennium saw Shah Rukh Khan rush past: he took the flame of anger but added a touch of the psychotic and not a small measure of irreverence.

Meanwhile, the roles on life's stage multiplied: a Lok Sabha MP from Allahabad to help out his friend Rajiv Gandhi, businessman, model, showman, NRI, entertainment tycoon with the Amitabah Bachchan Corporation Limited, etc. And with it all came the kind of problems he could not dishum-dishum away as he did on screen: Bofors, the tussle with V.P. Singh, creditors wanting to grab his house. And the biggest dilemma: no new avatar for the screen. The edifice of the legend began to show some cracks.

The legend and the man parted ways.

Madhu Jain is senior editor, India Today.