Sanju Baba Turns A Year Younger!

Sanjay Dutt is universally known as Baba in the film industry. When we first spoke, I insisted on calling him ‘Sanjay’. He was happy. “Who wants to be called Baba at my age?”

It reminded me of Rishi Kapoor who hated being nicknamed ‘Chintu’. There are so many similarities between Dutt and Kapoor: both are from illustrious film families whose parents were actors, and both Sanjay Dutt and Rishi Kapoor fought hard to encrypt a screen identity beyond the family surname.

Both fought cancer. One lost, Sanjay Dutt has emerged stronger. Or so he says. Those close to him say he’s still the same naïve little boy who couldn’t tell the difference between the toy guns that his doting mother bought for him, and the real ones.

Sanjay’s most memorable birthdays were the ones his mom, the legendary Nargis, organized for him. Little Sanju Baba would open his eyes with the gifts that Mama hid under the bed and the day would end with the party where she would personally cook her son’s favourite dishes.

“I always warned my wife not to spoil Sanjay. But she wouldn’t listen,” the honourable Mr. Sanjay Dutt once lamented to me.

Sanjay had to pay a heavy price for his mollycoddled upbringing. When he was being taken to prison, even his faithful girlfriend, a celebrated actress now happily married, deserted him.

“I kept dialing her. She didn’t respond,” there was hurt disbelief in Sanjay’s voice after years of the betrayal.

It’s very difficult to imagine Sanju Baba being 66. At heart, he confesses he is still a Baba. But he says when he looks into the mirror, he feels older. Sanjay Dutt has been in the film industry for more than forty years. For more than twenty years, he fought for his freedom.

In the thick of his legal tangles, Sanjay had once blurted out to me, “I want to be free, Subhash. I want to walk into any consulate and get my visa. I want my passport to be with me. I want to visit any country I want. Most important of all, I want the court cases to end.”

Dutt’s life has gone through tremendous upheavals in recent times. The best thing he did was to get rid of the undesirable people in his life. Sanjay disagreed. “No, the best thing I did was to marry Manyata. She brought that stability in my life that I badly needed. This is the happiest relationship I’ve ever been in. My life has been a rollercoaster. I’ve somewhere in my heart always wanted a woman like Maanyata. In our society, a woman has to make a lot of sacrifices for her man. And Maanyata has done that. I’m not the easiest of persons to handle. Maanyata is just right for me.”

As an actor, Sanjay Dutt excels in gangsters’ roles. Right from J.P. Dutta’s underrated classic Hathyar in 1989, Sanjay Dutt has been typecast as the outlaw. His own favourite performances are in Naam, Vaastav and Munnabhai. Hathyaar (1992) is a hugely underrated gangster saga directed by J.P. Dutta where Sanjay Dutt played a boy obsessed with guns who ends up making a profession out of shooting. No film has tapped Dutt’s unique blend of machismo and childlike innocence as effectively.

Says director J.P. Dutta, “There is a child hidden in Sanju’s he-man personality. In Hathyar I explored that child’s accidental journey into guns and crime.” Though the film didn’t click, it remains to this day one of Dutt’s finest performances.

Munnabhai MBBS comes a close second. We’ll never know how first-choice Shah Rukh Khan would have played Munnabhai. Dutt embraced the part as though he was born to play the goofy, lovable, over-aged student in a medical college who spreads happiness everywhere. The most endearing hero of Hindi cinema since Rajesh Khanna in Anand. Director Raj Kumar Hirani tapped the saintly side of Dutt that only his mother knew about.

Every time I’d speak to Sanjay Dutt during his years and years of trial and tribulation, he would end the interview with one question.

“Am I going to be a free man, Subhash? I am not a terrorist.” He sounded like Shah Khan in My Name Is Khan.