Gerald D'Cunha

M y wife and I wanted to watch ‘Sanju’ and we did it on the very first day! We are happy we did it! It’s perfectly fine, if someone, who loves our county more than we both do, call my wife and me as ‘Desh Drohis’… Because, to them Sanjay Dutt was a ‘Desh Drohi’, a ‘Terrorist’, a ‘hard core criminal’, a 'shameless womanizer', a 'dirty drug addict'… Add more, if I have left out anything, please… The day we watched ‘Sanju’, it was a full house. And, who had filled the house? Such lovely people – grandparents and young boys and girls, couple from decent families… and, I did not see a single soul going home ‘cursing’ Sanjay Dutt, Ranbir Kapoor, Rajkumar Hirani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra,  Paresh Rawal or anyone… And, I don’t believe, that any one of them will love our country less now just because they made or watched ‘Sanju’… I haven’t met Sanjay Dutt or his father, Sunil Dutt. I have never been a great fan of both except for Munna bhai ...

I admire the team that is making the upcoming Hindi movie, ‘Sanju’, a biopic on Sanjay Dutt. The life of Sanjay Dutt has everything in it – the good, the bad and the ugly. Some of the choices he made, at various points of his life, had proved to him very costly and he had to pay a heavy price for those mistakes. The suffering in his life – be it his mother’s or first wife’s cancer – were beyond his control. But, through all of them, including his jail terms, Sanjay had been a graceful human being. Like many around me, I have known him only from what I have read about him or seen about him. But, I have, always, admired him for the way he had dealt with the consequences of his choices, and moved on in life… I seriously feel: If Sanjay Dutt knew, that he was making some wrong choices, he would not have made them. Now, the question: Did he really not know, that he was making some wrong choices – like doing drugs or possession of AK-47? My answer is a philosophical on...