It were the most restless hours of Neil Nitin Mukesh’s life when he spent his time of two hours in Tihar jail on Monday afternoon as part of the role in the film Jail (connected to reality about the life of prisoners).Neil Nitin Mukesh and Madhur Bhandarkar’s jodi is all excited about their upcoming venture ‘Jail’ which is releasing on November 6.
Neil reached Tihar around 2 in the afternoon with his co-star Manoj Bajpai, director Madhur Bhandarkar and music composer Shamir Tandon. Neil, Manoj and Madhur were immediately recognized and mobbed by the inmates. Getting emotional Neil says, “Every barrack has a television with 20 channels. So they had seen our movies. What I saw in their eyes was an amazing pain. We had taken along a small orchestra. Shamir Tandon and all of us sang Lataji’s Daata sun le maula sun le, followed by Kitne ajeeb rishte hain yahan par and Sikandar from Madhur’s Page 3. When we sang Sikandar the prisoners burst into a dance. This was the only time I saw them really let go of themselves.”
He also added that “What I saw in Tihar was not just prisoners put in for punishment. But human beings who have been put in a 400-acre city with the purpose of reforming them and making them suitable for mainstream existence when they are released.” The two-hour-thirty-minute visit has filled the moments of his life with serious thoughts that have changed Neil’s life forever. “There was cage filled with birds. I hate to see caged birds. I requested the DG of police to please free them. He listened to me, allowed me to enter the big cage and free the birds personally. It was the most liberating experience of my life.”
Mugdha and others teased him a lot by giving him a new nick name of a 'gora'. "There’s also a shopping arcade at Tihar where everything under the sun made by the prisoners is branded TJ (Tihar Jail) and sold. I was told the revenues from these handmade Tihar goods comes to 7.5 crore rupees every year. I bought a kambal (woolen blanket), shawl, kurta, sweets and other edibles.”