Fair to say, ‘Zende Zindabad!’

The only Charlie worth snorting is Inspector Zende NetflixBy which I mean itrsquos a film about the serial killer Charles Sobhraj As was Main Aur Charles 2015 mdash whose lead actor Randeep Hooda told me hersquod also been regularly in touch with the OG Charles then So was the BBC series The Serpent 2021 NetflixOnly that both so stylish and served steaming hot left me cold The problem isnrsquot with gangster as protagonist The issue is with lack of empathy for the heroFor all that onscreen colourchemistry what must you feel for a darkly dangerous bloke allegedly responsible for over 32 motiveless bloody murders many of them bikiniclad women across continents while he gets away through jailbreaks multiple timesI suppose the only way to see a serial killer is say Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the disturbed deranged Psycho Raman 2016Madhukar Zende the actual police officer on whom the filmrsquos protagonist is based Picmidday archivesWhat if you kept that smooth criminal Charles for a charming character as is still But switched the picturersquos PoV to the cop instead Wouldnrsquot that work better for an effective counterpointThatrsquos Chinmay Mandlekarrsquos film with Manoj Bajpayee in and as Inspector Zende modelled on the retired cool Mumbai Police cop Madhukar Zende pronounced Jhende who happened to nab Charlie twice during his career 195996Having met him I can tell OG Zende is blessed with innate sense of humour The tone the movie adopts is fairly playful despite the subject ldquoWhich is actually tougher to achieve Humour humanisesrdquo Ruchikaa Kapoor Sheikh Netflixrsquos film content head tells meBrilliant Jim Sarbh plays Charles at the other end Did the OG Charlie 81 currently in France having served a term in Nepal call him too I ask JimNope ldquoMaybe he doesnrsquot if hersquos not explicitly namedrdquo coactor Manoj jokes to me Jimrsquos character in Inspector Zende is called Carl BhojrajIf Irsquom not mistaken hersquos half Indian half Lebanese in the film mdash as against half IndianSindhi half Vietnamese with a French stepfather in real lifeThatrsquos the dude and itrsquos true who fled Delhirsquos highestsecurity Tihar Jail like it was plainly a walk in the park with his car parked outside mdash having sedated all the inmates and officials inside back in 1986 when the film is setThe retired top coprsquos recently released book Mumbairsquos Most Wanted The Thrilling Casefiles of a SupercopWhich is also an elaborate sequence in the series Black Warrant 2025 Netflix based on the life of Sunil Gupta jailer at Tihar for 35 yearsThat show was the first time I read the book itrsquos based on right after Which is a genuinely fulfilling experience if the source material as was the case is nonfictionAs against fiction where the pleasure inevitably gets conflicted between the book and the filmseriesHence I repeated the experiment laying my hands on the OG Madhukar Zendersquos memoir Mumbairsquos Most Wanted HarperCollins right after watching Inspector Zende What did I figureThat therersquos so much more to lsquoInspector Zendersquosrsquo career than nabbing Charles twice thatrsquos merely two chapters in his book Which isnrsquot to ignore the stardom he achieved as a resultConsider as OG Zende tells me the Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi was on a routine visit to Mumbai soon after Inspector Zende was on lsquobandobastrsquo duty to the PMrsquos motorcade passing by that stopped suddenly because Rajiv had recognised Zende on the streetLikewise he recalls Lata Mangeshkar noticed the Amul hoarding outside her home mdash with the tagline ldquoAtake pe Zenderdquo referencing Zende to Marathasrsquo victory over Atak Afghanistan She personally felicitated him at a family eventWhatrsquos there in the book but not in the film is how Zende arrested Charles first time on Hersquod helped reform a wayward drugaddict youth Ajay once who came in contact with Charles later stillThe guy chickened out of Charliersquos group but ended up accidentally killing a person instead For help boy visited Zende Zende using that intelligence followed Charles to Hotel Taj Mahal PalacehellipMost police memoirs are by top retired IPS officers who obviously provide a BTS eagleeye perspective on major case filesWhich is quite different from a beat coprsquos daredevilry and wormrsquos eye view of street gangs and how they grew literally from scratch mdash Dawood Byculla Company Pathan ganghellip Zendersquos the only cop to have arrested Haji Mastan twice that tooMumbairsquos Most Wanted is a rare firsthand draft of crime history Some of my surprise at it is natural OG Zende belongs to a time before my adult life let alone in Bombay when puns over Zende and Zindabad were recurring headlines in city dailiesYet what emerges is a portrait of a conscientious unpretentious gentleman cop who believed in building bonds with community whether posted in the dark Dharavi of the 1980s or calming violent crowds after a hockey match at Cooperage GroundI asked OG Zende what episode he thinks must make it to the sequel of Inspector Zende He recalls an incident during the 1992 riots when he dived in alone inside a frenzieddemented mob that had surrounded a packed police van to torch it in Suleiman ChowkieHe knew these people They trusted him The crowd parted Inspector Zende deserves a sequelseries Whether or not hersquos interested mdash itrsquod be hard to match Manoj in the role thoughMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass cultureHe tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper