That Sanjay Dutt has had perhaps the most colourful life among all actors in Bollywood was revealed today at the teaser launch of the biopic Sanju on the actor made by Raju Hirani. Co-writer Abhijat Joshi, who shared the stage with Hirani, producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Ranbir Kapoor who plays Dutt in the biopic, shared interesting tidbits on how they got Dutt to give them all the exciting details of his personal life that went into the script of the film.
“A lot of the stories he told us could not go into the film,” Abhijat admitted while narrating an incident Dutt told him about how Barrack Obama only recognized him as “Munna Bhai”. This happened in 2003, when Obama was serving on the Illinois Senate before his 2004 election to the US Senate, and the politician and actor met at an Indian Independence Day Parade in Chicago.
Dutt told Abhijat, “There were a lot of Indians on the road and ignoring Obama, they ran to me shouting ‘Munna Bhai! Munna Bhai!’ to the politician’s surprise.” Obama went on to become President of the US and served for two terms but he never forgot how Dutt upstaged him on a Chicago road.
If Abhijat thought that Barrack Obama was the biggest foreign celebrity that Dutt had met, the Sanju co-writer was proved wrong when he questioned the actor about this later. “When he mentioned the Barrack Obama incident, I thought he was drunk,” Abhijat delightfully said to rousing applause and laughter from the media. “So I checked the Chicago Tribune for that date in 2003 and sure enough, the story was there,” Abhijat said. Convinced that there were several more such incidents in the actor’s life, Abhijat asked Dutt, “Who was the biggest celebrity you met?” And Sanjay Dutt thought about it for a while and said, “That would have to be Nelson Mandela!”
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