The excitement over Sanju, Rajkumar Hirani’s biopic on Sanjay Dutt starring Ranbir Kapoor, has reached its peak with the film all set to release tomorrow. Bollywood critics are wondering how much of the Khalnayak superstar’s real riotous life has been brought to celluloid by the Munna Bhai filmmaker.
Buzz is that some scenes were so gut-wrenching that they had to be left out on the edit table or were ordered cut by the Central Board of Film Certification despite the fact that Dutt had lived through them in real life. Like the scene where he is in great distress in jail because the toilet in his cell is choked and overflowing.
Raju was reportedly advised to delete this scene because it might prove to be insensitive to viewers and also showed the shoddy infrastructure of Indian jail systems. The scene was also described as not adding value to the narrative besides showing the helplessness of the protagonist.
Now people close to Dutt are wondering whether there is any mention of him attempting suicide during his incarceration in Arthur Road Jail in Sanju. Sources who spent time behind bars with the actor during the Mumbai serial blasts trial swear that there were whispers in the jail that in a moment of extreme despair Dutt had attempted to hang himself in the toilet.
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He was apparently saved in the nick of time by undertrial Mohammed Jindran who also allegedly used to supply Dutt with drugs behind bars. Details of the attempted suicide were brought to the notice of the jail authorities by a Nigerian drug runner named Robert William Ogabe and subsequently revealed the actor’s father, Sunil Dutt, and the Mumbai Police Commissioner then, Amarjit Singh Samra.
But otherwise mention of this sad incident in Arthur Road Jail was all but buried. A Bollywood source that got wind of it wrote that Dutt attempted suicide because he was heartbroken after reportedly being let down by Madhuri Dixit who he was then seeing and who distanced herself from the actor after he got entangled in the serial blasts case. Will this be revealed in Sanju? Wait and see.
