- published: 27 Sep 2012
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Chopra (Devanāgarī: चोपड़ा, IAST: chopṛa) is a Punjabi Khatri family name.
Chopra is a Punjabi Khatri clan and belongs to the Bara-Ghar (12 House) Khatri section.
The earliest reference to this family name dates back to around 400 AD. One of the important characters of a famous Punjabi legend 'Raja Rasalu' is minister Mahita Chopra. Most scholars agree that Raja Rasalu is a historical figure that ruled from Sialkot and lived sometime between 400 to 500 AD. If this is true, then the Chopra family name developed by that time.
Other references are more recent. The father and son pair of the Diwan Sawan Mal and Mul Raj Chopra were successive governors of Multan under Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the early 1800s.
Yash Raj Chopra (Hindi: यश चोपड़ा, born 27 September 1932 in Lahore, British India) is an Indian filmmaker, film director, screenwriter, and a highly successful Bollywood producer. Waqt, Deewar, Kabhi Kabhie, Silsila, Lamhe, Chandni, Darr, Dil To Pagal Hai, and Veer-Zaara are some of his highly popular movies. He is the founder of Yash Raj Films.
Chopra has won the Filmfare Award for Best Director and the Filmfare Award for Best Movie four times each. The Government of India honoured him with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2001 and the Padma Bhushan in 2005.
Yash initially worked as an assistant to I. S. Johar, and then for his director-producer brother, B.R. Chopra. Chopra gave him his first directorial opportunity in Dhool Ka Phool (1959). Later he set up his own movie production company, Yash Raj Films, under which Daag of 1973 was his first movie.
As of December 2011, Yash is currently directing an untitled romantic film starring Shahrukh Khan, Katrina Kaif and Anushka Sharma.
Yash and his wife, Pamela, have two sons Aditya and Uday. Aditya is also a film director and manages most of Yash Raj Production House. Uday is an assistant director turned actor; he received his first acting break in Aditya's Mohabbatein.
Katrina Kaif (born 16 July 1984) is a British Indian actress and former model who appears in Indian films, mainly in the Hindi-language film industry. She has also appeared in Telugu and Malayalam films. She was voted the sexiest Asian woman in the world by Eastern Eye in the years 2008, 2009 and 2010. Being a British citizen, she works in India on an employment visa.
Kaif made her acting debut with Kaizad Gustad's box office bomb Boom (2003). She tasted success in 2007 with Vipul Shah's Namastey London and followed with such films as Anees Bazmee's Welcome (2007), Abbas-Mustan's Race (2008) and Kabir Khan's New York (2009). She has since appeared in critically and commercially successful films like Prakash Jha's political thriller Rajneeti (2010) and Zoya Akhtar's dramedy Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011).
Kaif was born in Hong Kong, to an Indian Kashmiri father, Mohammed Kaif, and an English mother, Susanna Turquotte, both of whom are British citizens. Her parents divorced when she was very young. Kaif once stated, "My dad, unfortunately, and not out of choice, has had no influence on our upbringing, on our religious or social or moral bearings." When she came to India, she changed her surname to Kaif, because it was Indian in origin. Furthermore, Ayesha Shroff has maintained that the actress' original name is Katrina Turquotte. Kaif has seven siblings; a brother and six sisters. From Hong Kong, she and her family moved to China, then to Japan. From there she went to France when she was 8, and thereafter lived for a few months at a time in Switzerland, Poland, Germany, Belgium, and other European countries. Then she moved with her family to Hawaii, and eventually to her mother's home country of England. Although it is often assumed that Kaif is from London, she lived there only for three years before finally moving to Mumbai.