The Internet never forgets, says Vishal Punjabi as his Main Hoon Na clip goes viral

The clipping of a dummy newspaper from the end credits of the film Main Hoon Na (2004) has netizens in splits, after all these years. The clipping ‘reports’ the death of Suniel Shetty’s character, “former Army officer Raghavan Dutta” and appears towards the end of the movie during the song Ye Fizayein.

What has caught their attention after 17 years of the film are the hilarious lines in the dummy report that describe the writer’s plight. “I seriously don’t know why I am typing this because no one is going to be able to read this through the camera but I guess I have no choice. You see the thing is that the colours don’t seem to match so I basically have to type this whole thing out…” it stated.

The person who wrote these lines is Vishal Punjabi, then an assistant with director with the film’s director Farah Khan, and now a renowned wedding filmmaker. He is better known as the official videographer for the weddings of actors Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh and cricketer Virat Kohli and actor Anushka Sharma. “I was Farah’s assistant in the beginning of my career…I used to work at SRK’s [Shah Rukh Khan] Red Chillies and this was a last-minute design thing they wanted me to do…I thought it would be a prop. To my horror, Manikandan [cinematographer] zoomed in on it and it made it to the cut,” he reveals.

He recalls the hard work that went in to prepare the dummy paper. Punjabi adds, “It was supposed to have the headline of Raghavan Dutta being killed. I printed a report of the incident and placed it on an actual newspaper thinking it will do the job, but it looked bad. So, I had to design the page and fill text. I didn’t think anybody will read it, till last year when I saw a desi review of the film was on YouTube and someone pointed it out.”

Punjabi has received plenty of calls and messages from his former industry colleagues after the clip went viral. “The secret came out after 17 years. My ex-colleagues texted me and we had a good laugh,” he says.

But the moral of the story, he believes, is, “All this while I thought I got away with it! But the Internet never forgets!”