When it comes to getting box office collections for a Bollywood, don't believe everything you see and hear. Indian cinema has a very poor record of keeping a right track of the collections. Mostly the numbers we get are from the producers themselves, who get it from the theatre-owners and the distributors. And as the trend goes, many of these producers give out bloated collections, either to satiate their egos or to show that their movies are hit. Now recently, even Akshay Kumar's Gold and John Abraham's Satyameva Jayate were under the radar for accusations of giving out blown up collections.

Both films, though belonging to different genres but sharing the common theme of patriotism, came out on August 15. Gold reportedly collected Rs 25.25 crore on the first day, while Satyameva Jayate collected Rs 20.52 crore on its opening day. Both the films have the record for being the highest opening day collections for their lead stars. These figures are given out by trade analyst Taran Adarsh.

However, industry watcher Ramesh Bala had different figures to share for both the films. For Gold, he tweeted, "#Gold 's Day 1 All-India Nett is ₹ 27 Crs.. Highest for @akshaykumar". He later put up another tweet that mentions the Rs 25 crore collections. As for Satyameva Jayate, he has this to say, "#SatyamevaJayate 's Day 1 All-India Nett is ₹ 18 Crs.. Highest for @TheJohnAbraham."

However, there are other trade experts who believe that either Gold or SM or both are fudging their collections. Though they haven't taken any names of the movies as such, their tweets say a lot -

Aniruddha Guha (columnist)

Girish Johar (producer, distributor)

Amul Vikas Mohan (Film producer and editor)

Many on Twitter are claiming that it is Satyameva Jayate that is showing fake figures, with blame falling on T-Series head Bhushan Kumar. They even made 'Shame on Bhushan' trend on Twitter -

Earlier, Salman Khan's Race 3 was also accused of increasing its box office collections to make the film look like a big earner. At that time, we had spoken to trade analyst Akshaye Rathi on this trend. Rathi told us then, "I think the only person, or anybody at all who has the right to state this (the box office figures) is the person who has any kind of documentary evidence about it. I certainly don't think that there is anybody who claims that the figures are inflated, has any documentary evidence of cinema-wise collections to state that. So we believe the figures that are given by the producers. The only way to counter it or to defer that is to bring documentary evidence in cinema-wise collections to prove that, which is not available with them."

Well, if this trend is true, then producers can keep on fooling the audience, but for how long? Like Guha said, we need a fail-safe box office calculator that gives us honest collections just how they do in the West.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 16, 2018 09:07 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).