Mayank Shekhar: Dutt's the thing about showbiz

Ranbir Kapoor as Sanjay Dutt in Rajkumar Hirani's forthcoming biopic, Sanju

As if director Rajkumar Hirani didn't already think actor Sanjay Dutt's story was crazy enough to base a whole film, and stake his career on, Dutt, during one of their conversations during the film's research, randomly mentioned to Hirani about how Barrack Obama calls him 'Munnabhai'.

"Obama, Munnabhai, what," Hirani was obviously flummoxed. His writer Abhijat Joshi later got on the phone to jot down details of what would otherwise seem like 'feku' news. Since Dutt had roughly mentioned when he'd met Obama in Chicago, Joshi looked up Chicago Tribune's records, and indeed found a report on a function where Obama, then an Illinois senator, was around, and the crowd (presumably desi), seeing Dutt, had rushed towards the actor instead - chanting 'Munnabhai, Munnnabhai', making Obama naturally call/know him by that name.

Not that this episode makes it to Hirani's forthcoming biopic, Sanju, but it tells you enough about how gods of non-fiction are simply kind on some (and not on others). Going through Yaseer Usman's stupendously breezy biography, Sanjay Dutt: The Crazy Untold Story Of Bollywood's Bad Boy, it's easy to tell that life just happened to the eternal man-child Dutt, even as he often looked away.

His brush with the underworld was part of the same larger-than-life movie that he seemed to live inside. Was he the first guy to rub shoulders with the Mafia? At least one famous actor from the '90s has told me about her healthy meeting with Dawood Ibrahim and family at their home while at a shoot in Dubai - a courtesy call that no one saw anything wrong with, then.

Another superstar recounted to me how he was invited to a function by the Mob that he declined. The calls wouldn't abate. He was offered a Maruti 1000 (top sedan at the time). He didn't relent, expecting repercussion, perhaps. The police, for some reason, did not formally register his case. Memory fails me with details of what was an off-the-record conversation anyway. But, if I recall right, a few months later, two hit-men were shot dead by cops right outside the actor's house. The police claimed they'd come down to kill off that super-star. Which is odd, he recalled. For what kind of a hit-job would you assign, without as basic a research as the fact that the actor was in New York on that day!

That politicians and police openly operated in cahoots with the Bombay underworld - rarely, if ever, troubling the common folk - all through the '80s, seems rather obvious. It suited the entertainment industry equally. And I don't mean just the movies - more so the bustling, First World nightlife, fuelled by black money that made Mumbai literally the awesome city that never sleeps. Things changed with 1993 serial blasts, which followed the heinous Hindu-Muslim riots in 1992.

Moral conservatism, once allowed to seep into a culture, smoothly expands like a multi-headed hydra eventually. You only have to look at countries west of India to get that sense. Bombay, now Mumbai, has never been the same since '93. It progressively gets worse by the day - or night, as it were. Imagine Dutt finding himself at the centre of this deadly change, because he ordered in 'guitars' (AK 56 rifles), and 'tennis balls' (hand grenades) to store in his house, before the blasts.

Was Dutt a terrorist? The courts have ruled against it. But, even as he'd spent time in jail in the '90s, he and his friends Sanjay Gupta and Mahesh Manjrekar were having friendly chit-chat with gangster Chhota Shakeel as late as 2002, asking the Bhai to send over a T-shirt as gift, bitching about a fellow nicknamed Chikna… The call was tapped. It became public. Pouf.

Was he being a star-struck kid? According to Usman's book, Dutt had signed off his petition for leniency to the President of India, with the word, "Cheers!". Does sound like a kid! The beauty of Usman's book is that, for the most part, it essentially collates explosive material already existing in popular publications. And this isn't as much about the underworld tapes as the sort of crazy material hair-salon film-fanzines used to publish back in the day - seeming like college gossip rags where stars, Dutt included, spoke to their love-interests, and exes through interviews!

And Dutt, to the manner, plus (film producer's) banner born, son of film stars, and star-politicians, elite if you may, came across as such an earthy, son-of-the-soil kind of biker bloke, hallucinating his father's hair on fire while he's lecturing him on life; spending hours in the gullies and bastis doing cheap drugs.

It's the sort of stuff that makes for a proverbially rockstar life. What's the big deal about being an actor anyway? There are thousands. Current showbiz, wholly walled in by publicists, and corporate suits, seems like a collective of bores in comparison. Unsurprisingly, actor Ranbir Kapoor, from the present crop, has to play Sanjay Dutt in a film to feel like a true-blue rockstar!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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