Shah Rukh Khan’s Dunki Is Sanjay Dutt’s Munna Bhai Chale Amerika We Never Got, Rajkumar Hirani Recycled The Story Only To Worsen It? [Opinion]
Okay, so forget Dunki exists and imagine this story with Munna and Circuit wanting to learn English only to go the US through the Donkey route after being trained by Boman Irani
Shah Rukh Khan’s Dunki Is Sanjay Dutt’s Munna Bhai Chale Amerika We Never Got, Rajkumar Hirani Recycled The Story… (Picture Credit: Facebook & YouTube)
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Okay, this is a pretty wild theory, which has been doing rounds on social media for a while now, but I found it pretty interesting to look into it from my perspective. So, fasten your seatbelts because “mausam bigadne wala hai!” Yes, we all had some strong opinions about Shah Rukh Khan in Dunki, but what if I tell you that the story might not have been written specifically for him in the first place?
Remember Sanjay Dutt, Arshad Warsi’s Munna Bhai Chale Amerika? Yes! The one whose promo went viral in the day and age when many thought getting viral meant getting the flu. Due to the unimaginable hype post-Munna Bhai MBBS & Lage Raho Munna Bhai’s box office success, the teaser to the film’s third part (a rarity in those days) created immense buzz, but little did everyone back in 2006 know of how it would never release.
After watching Dunki, a lot of questions flooded through my mind – could this be the Munna Bhai Chale Amerika we never got? Was Shah Rukh Khan’s Hardy never a character & it was always Munna & Circuit ‘learning English’ to take the Donkey route to the US and, hence, the name. Has Rajkumar Hirani recycled the same story because that film never did materialize owing to reasons best known to the makers and Sanjay Dutt? Let’s talk all about it & more!
If you remember the pretty forgettable teaser of Munna Bhai Chale Amerika, it starts with the visual of Sanjay Dutt’s Munna & Arshad Warsi’s Circuit reading the ‘Learn English in 30 days’ book. It goes on to showcase a gag that develops Munna & Circuit’s wish to go to the United States of America, and they need to learn English for the same. Doesn’t it sound too similar to be just a coincidence?
Even in Dunki, Shah Rukh Khan’s Hardy & his friends aim to go to the UK, and for that, they try to learn the language to crack IELTS from a school mastered by Boman Irani (an integral part of both Munna Bhai & Lage Raho Munna Bhai).
Dunki’s story in Munna Bhai’s world could’ve been a BLOCKBUSTER!
Okay, so forget Dunki exists and imagine this story with Munna and Circuit wanting to learn English only to go the US through the Donkey route after being trained by Boman Irani. Doesn’t that sound like something Rajkumar Hirani could very well write for Munna Bhai Chale Amerika? Munna could’ve had a better reason than Shah Rukh Khan‘s Hardy to leave the country. He was anyway a ‘bhai’ & the chaos because of his underworld connection could’ve laid a perfect conflict for the lead character to naturally wanting to move out instead of “I’m doing this out of love for someone I met 11 seconds ago.”
Hell, Munna would’ve had even a better reason to miss home and want to come back for all the memories his character has spent in India. Rajkumar Hirani could have taken the hardest to even kill Circuit, only to take the emotional quotient of the film to another level. All this would’ve made so much more sense than whatever he did with Shah Rukh Khan’s Dunki.
As already mentioned, this is just a wild theory the cinema fan in me couldn’t stop thinking about, and Dunki would’ve been in a way better form and shape than Sanjay Dutt, Arshad Warsi’s Munna Bhai Chale Amerika.
