Cyanide Mohan/’Dahad’, Bombay Talkies/’Jubilee’: True Stories from Real Life

Mumbai (Best Hindu News): The similarity between Anand Verma’s evil character Anand Swarnakar in the web series ‘Dahad’ and notorious serial killer ‘Cyanide Mohan’ is not hidden from those who are aware of his real-life story. However, the silence of the makers – Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti’s Excel Entertainment – ​​on the inspiration behind the show ‘Dahad’ is shocking.

Mohan Kumar Vivekananda alias ‘Cyanide Mohan’ was a soft-spoken physical education teacher between 1980 and 2003, who was arrested in 2009 in his ancestral village outside Mangaluru, Karnataka. In Roar, Anand Swarnakar teaches Hindi at a women’s college in Rajasthan. But the differences between the two end there.

‘Cyanide Mohan’ arrested for marrying women from economically weaker families, killing them using cyanide-laced contraceptive pills after spending one night with them, and dumping their bodies dressed in wedding clothes in public toilets I went. He repeated this crime 20 times. sounds familiar?

The serial killer continued his method of unknowingly administering cyanide to his victims as contraceptives so that they would leave no marks on their bodies to indicate that they had died an unnatural death.

‘Cyanide Mohan’ was sentenced to death in four cases and life imprisonment in 15 other cases. He was last convicted in 2020 for the rape and murder of a Kerala woman, his 20th victim.

The death sentence awarded to him in four cases was later commuted to life imprisonment, which he is serving at the Hindalga Central Prison in Belagavi, Karnataka.

If the makers of Dhaad have remained tight-lipped about the most likely inspiration for Dhaad, then so have the obvious parallels between Vikramaditya Motwani’s Jubilee and the lives of Bombay Talkies founders Himanshu Roy and Devika Rani and their star Ashok Kumar. There was silence.

Anyone who has watched the web series would know that the three lead characters – studio mogul Sukanta Roy, played by Prosenjit Chatterjee; his actress-wife Sumitra Kumari (Aditi Rao Hydari); and lab assistant Binod Das turned lead actor Madan Kumar (Aparshakti Khurana) – inspired by the three key figures of Bombay Talkies, which launched the careers of Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, apart from Ashok Kumar.

These parallels are not superficial – even Devika Rani’s torrid romance and her subsequent escapade with Life Naiya co-star Najm-ul-Hasan forms the crux of the opening episode of Jubilee, starring Nandish Sandhu as Jamshed Khan and Hydari plays the role of Sumitra.

Neither Motwane nor Amazon Prime, the OTT platform streaming Jubilee, has said a word about the apparent similarity of the two stories.