Sanjay Khan demanded a gun after Shatrughan Sinha insulted him; Subhash Ghai spent a day in jail: When Bob Christo recalled details

In his autobiography, actor Bob Christo once recalled a story about Shatrughan Sinha and Sanjay Khan entering into a violent confrontation, which resulted in Subhash Ghai being arrested.

By: Entertainment Desk

New Delhi | October 23, 2024 03:11 PM IST

3 min read

Bob Christo found himself in the middle of a confrontation between Sanjay Khan and Shatrughan Sinha.

Bob Christo had a colourful life, playing the white villain in several Indian films during the 1980s. Before Sanjay Khan took him under his wing, Bob built sets in Cambodia for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. But it was his work in Indian films that brought him immense fame, which lasted until he died in 2011. In his autobiography, Flashback: My Life and Times in Bollywood and Beyond, Bob Christo narrated fun anecdotes from his life. One such story nearly took a violent turn, with Bob Christo finding himself in the middle of a possible confrontation between Sanjay Khan and Shatrughan Sinha.

He wrote that the confrontation took place at Ranjeet’s bungalow. Present on the scene were Sanjay, Shatrughan, Prem Chopra, and filmmaker Subhash Ghai. Drinks were consumed, and tempers rose, and somehow, Bob wrote, ‘a fight started’. He continued, “I am not interested in fights really; as long as I’m not involved, I keep out of the way. However, Sanjay was my friend and whatever Shatru said did not go down well with Sanjay.” He noticed that most people were siding with Shatrughan, which made him stand up for his friend all the more. “One person went into the kitchen and came out with a knife in his hands. I disarmed him and told them to control themselves. Several minutes later Sanjay and I left,” he wrote.

Also read – When Rishi Kapoor accused Sanjay Khan of throwing a glass full of liquor at his face during altercation: ‘If I had lodged a police complaint…’

Sanjay Khan with wife Zarine Khan. (Photo: Simi/YouTube)

It seemed that things didn’t de-escalate even after they left Ranjeet’s bungalow. “That very night I received a call from Sanjay at about 5 am. Sanjay said, ‘Come over and bring Betsy,’ which was our code word for ‘gun’. I went right away and Sanjay explained that shots had been fired from Ranjit’s property across to his bungalow and someone had also fired at least two shots from outside Sanjay’s front gate.”

Bob and Sanjay investigated; they questioned the guard outside Sanjay’s house, but it was too dark for him to have seen anything. They ‘picked up the spent cartridges of the bullets and handed them over to police’ when they arrived. After that, Bob wrote, they went over to Dilip Kumar‘s house for some advice. Subhash Ghai ended up a spending ‘a day in the lock-up’ before he was bailed out, and a meeting was called between the ‘seniors of the industry’. The conflict resolved itself, but this, Bob revealed, is how Shatrughan earned the moniker ‘Shotgun’.

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