MUMBAI: What inspired RGV to make Satya ?

A weird thought invoked by the murder of music baron Gulshan Kumar eventuated into Satya , while a chance meeting with a serial blasts convict resulted in the epoch-making Company , the two cult gangster films made in Hindi cinema.

Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma (RGV) revealed this in his recently released autobiography Guns and Thighs — The Story of My Life , published by Rupa. “…One day, I was sitting in the office of producer Jhamu Sughand, who has produced films like Rangeela and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam , when he received a phone call that music baron Gulshan Kumar had been shot dead. “A shocked Jhamu told me that Gulshan had woken up around 7 a.m. and had called him to say that at 8 a.m. he was going to meet a singer; at 8.30 a.m. he was supposed to meet a friend, after which he would go to the temple and then come to meet him,” Varma recalls in the book. He adds “While he (Jhamu) was talking, since I have this tendency of all the time thinking cinematically, I wondered if Gulshan Kumar woke up at 7 o’clock, then at what time would the killer have woken up? Did he tell his mom to wake him up because he had a shooting to carry out? Did he have his breakfast before committing the crime or after? “These thoughts were coming into my head because I was trying to intercut the moments of the man who died, with those of the man who killed him. Then it suddenly struck me that you always hear about gangsters only when they either kill or die. But what do they do in between? That was the thought which eventually resulted in Satya ,” writes Varma, who directed the 1998 film based on the lives of people in the underworld.–PTI