On 2 July 2025, at a press conference at Ovation Hollywood, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce read out its Class of 2026 for the Walk of Fame: 35 names across film, television, music, live theatre and sports entertainment. Among them — with Timothée Chalamet, Miley Cyrus, Emily Blunt, Rachel McAdams and Demi Moore — was Deepika Padukone.
She is the first Indian actress ever chosen, and the first person whose career was built in Indian cinema rather than in Hollywood.
The ceremony has not been scheduled
More than a year after the announcement, no date has been set. That is normal: selection and unveiling are separate events, and honourees are given two years from selection to arrange theirs. Miss that window and the star is forfeited.
For the Class of 2026 the clock started in July 2025, which puts the deadline in July 2027. So there is no cause for concern in the silence — but there is also no date, whatever you may have read.
The part nearly every report got wrong
The announcement was carried almost everywhere as the first Indian on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It is not true, and the man it overlooks deserves better.
Sabu Dastagir — born Selar Sabu on 27 January 1924 in Karapura, Mysore — was the son of a mahout, an elephant driver in the service of the Maharaja of Mysore. At thirteen he was found by the British documentary maker Robert Flaherty and cast as the lead in Elephant Boy (1937), from Rudyard Kipling's Toomai of the Elephants. He went on to The Drum, Arabian Nights, Cobra Woman and more than a dozen others.
He became an American citizen in 1944 and served in the US Army in the Second World War. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles at 39.
His star went up on Hollywood Boulevard in 1960 — sixty-five years before Deepika Padukone's name was read out in the same city.
Both things are true
Deepika Padukone's selection is genuinely a first: no actress from India, and nobody who made their name in Indian cinema, had been chosen before. Sabu's star is also real, and it has been there since 1960.
The accurate sentence is the longer one. It is worth the extra words, because the short version quietly erases a boy from Karapura who got to Hollywood in 1937 — which is, by any measure, the more improbable journey of the two.
One more date
She turned 40 on 5 January 2026, and marked it with an unannounced meeting with fans. Sabu Dastagir's birthday was 27 January. The two Indian names on the Walk of Fame were born three weeks apart, sixty-two years apart.
टिप्पणियाँ
अभी कोई टिप्पणी नहीं। सबसे पहले आप लिखें।