'Munna Bhai' Duo Reunite: Rajkumar Hirani and Arshad Warsi Speak Friendship, Hakka Noodles and National Awards

The first day Arshad Warsi stepped onto the sets of Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. (2003), he had the film's director — a tall, genial debutant named Rajkumar Hirani, with some editing and ad-filmmaking experience — in a bind.

"We were doing the first scene and I realised Arshad was not speaking from the script," Hirani recalls. The actor was trotting his lines out of order, making his own additions and improvisations. Flustered, Hirani strode up to his second lead and instructed him to play it straight. "He complied but the second take was not as good as the first one. I discovered then that Arshad has a unique process.”

This, fundamentally, has been the core of Hirani and Warsi's creative relationship, which yielded the two Munna Bhai films and a concept trailer (for the shelved sequel, Munnabhai Chale America). In each, Warsi played Circuit, among the most lovable sidekicks in mainstream cinema. A child's interpretation of a Mumbai tapori gangster, in a black kurta, chain and flared jeans, flourishing his pocket knife like swatting unseen houseflies, Circuit was a meme before memes, and a comic sandbox for his creators.

He was also a lifeline. A 90s leading man who could do the jig, Warsi's career was on the brink of stagnation when he broke out as Circuit, landing that role that would become his calling card for years. Indeed, so popular was the Munna-Circuit shtick that, just three years later, in Rohit Shetty's Golmaal (2006), Warsi was paying self-homage in a scene.

"There are some people who leave a big impact on your life, and Mr. Hirani has done that for me big time," Warsi tells THR India.

20 years on, the duo has finally reunited on Pritam and Pedro, a crime-comedy series with Hirani as showrunner. In what appears a 360-degree turn from Circuit, Arshad plays a cop in the show. And instead of gruff Sanjay Dutt by his side, he has debutant Vir Hirani, Rajkumar Hirani's son, as his cybercrime-solving buddy.

"Our friendship was always there and we kept in touch," Warsi, who has since flowered into one of the finest comic talents in the country, while remaining criminally underutilised by an unimaginative industry, remarks. "I strongly believe that for any collaboration, a project should come together organically. So when he called me for this, I was really delighted."

Hirani says he got sucked into the world of cybercrime after Amit Dubey, a popular investigator and national security expert, sent him a handful of short stories based on his findings.

"Typically, in movies, we see someone sitting at a computer pressing zeroes and ones. Instead, Dubey was telling me exactly how cybercrime is done and how it's solved. There is one story, for instance, about an ATM being hacked and stolen that fascinated me, and we have included it in the series."

Warsi has played enough fish-out-of-water goofs with a golden heart for Pedro to have been a breeze. This time, though, Hirani was a step ahead. "The first take was in my style. But from the second take, I did not have to improvise because Raju had already predicted and written what I would say!"

We return to the glory days of the Munna Bhai films, and Warsi reveals that he 'almost' won a National Award for the second film (Incidentally, three of his collaborators on Pritram and Pedro — namely Hirani, director Avinash Arun and main antagonist Vikrant Massey — have National Awards).

"During Lage Raho (2006), word got out that the Best Supporting Actor award would go to someone from this film. So everybody assumed it's me. I started getting congratulatory messages from the industry. It later transpired that the award went to Dilip Prabhavalkar, who played Mahatma Gandhi in the film. I said to myself, fair enough, I can't beat Gandhiji!"

While Lage Raho has its moments, nothing beats the first Munna Bhai for sheer unstrained hilarity. There is a breathlessly droll, borderline racist and yet undeniably brilliant sequence — one involving Circuit, an urgent phone call, and an unsuspecting Chinese tourist — that belongs in the pantheon of great Hindi comedy scenes.

Hirani remembers its evolution well. "We had mapped out much of the scene, with Circuit spotting the tourist, knocking him out cold, and taking his body to Munna for his dissection class," he recalls. "But I remember Arshad added a line, calling the tourist, "Aey, hakka noodles". From there on, we decided that every time he meets a new character, he will give them a nickname. That's why when he meets a trainee doctor he calls him 'dispensary' and so forth." Another wicked line — "ghadi karke daalu kya? (shall I fold this man and stuff him into the bag?)"— also came from Warsi.

"You can only improvise at this level when you have a director who gets it," Warsi observes. "If you suggest a line to Raju, he will edit the entire scene in his mind to ascertain if it works."

Not everything passes, though. A throwaway suggestion by Warsi — to lure the tourist into an ambulance by claiming 'Madhuri Dixit' is seated inside —was rejected by the director. Instead, the actor ended up delivering one of his funniest line readings..."I'll show you bhukka (hungry) Indian, very bhukka."

"It was a whole different brand of comedy," Warsi looks back lovingly. "It was intelligent humour that we were doing. It wasn't buffoonery."

The maker of 3 Idiots, PK and Sanju, one of Hirani's foremost gifts is his ability to flip (and keep on flipping) the emotional tenor of a film. Late in Munna Bhai MBBS, there is a scene where Sanjay Dutt and Warsi are drinking at night, emptying their heavy hearts. Circuit blinks at the stars, sighing, trying to spot his dead family members.

"The way Arshad says his line, "Mumbai has a lot of pollution... I cannot see my maa. It was really beautiful," says Hirani, who is currently developing a third instalment in the franchise, and, for good reason, does not want to rush it.