By Ayesha Khan 
Mumbai, June 6: Sanjay Dutt keeps it simple every year. No press statement. No carefully worded message drafted by someone in a PR office. Just a photograph of himself with his father and a few lines that clearly came from him and nobody else. “Happy birthday dad, I love you and miss you everyday. You are and always be my pillar of strength and my inspiration.”
The grammar slips a little in that last sentence. Which is exactly why it lands.
Saturday marked what would have been Sunil Dutt’s 96th birthday. And his son, like he has done in the years since losing him, found his way to the only tribute that makes sense anymore. A picture. A few honest words. The kind of thing you write when you are not thinking about how it looks.
The People Who Responded
What happened in the comments was not the usual celebrity pile-on where people drop emojis and move on. Jackie Shroff was there. Ayesha Shroff was there. People who had actually known Sunil Dutt, worked around him, cared about him, took a moment to say something real.
Paresh Ghelani, who has been close to the Dutt family for years, wrote the comment that most people are still thinking about. “The mold that shaped a man like you seems to have ceased to exist. The world needs men of your character, strength, compassion, and integrity now more than ever. We miss you every day, Dad.”
Read that again slowly. That is not a comment. That is a confession about what the world has lost and not managed to replace.
Before the Fame Became the Story
There is a version of Sunil Dutt’s life that gets reduced to bullet points. Born June 6, 1929. Acted in Mother India. Became a politician. Died May 2005. That version is accurate and completely insufficient.
He came from a village in what is now Pakistan, lost his father early, moved to Bombay as a young man with very little except the kind of stubbornness that either destroys people or builds them. In his case, it built him. He worked in radio before he found films. He was not handed anything.
Mother India is where most people locate him historically, and fair enough. That film required him to play a character of real psychological violence and eventual tragedy alongside Nargis, who would later become his wife. Their on-screen dynamic had a charge that no director could have scripted from scratch. He was raw in that film in a way that early performances sometimes are, before an actor learns to protect himself. The rawness was the whole point.
After that he did not rest on it. Waqt came, then Padosan, then Sadhna. Three completely different registers, three different proofs that he was not a one-note actor borrowing from a single well. Padosan in particular tends to surprise people who only know him from the serious work. He was funny. Genuinely, uncomfortably funny. And he committed to it without any of the self-consciousness that serious actors sometimes bring to comedy when they are worried about being taken less seriously afterward.
What Five Terms Actually Means
The political chapter of his life does not get enough serious attention, possibly because film people who enter politics are often treated as novelty acts by journalists covering both worlds.
Sunil Dutt was a Member of Parliament from Mumbai North West for five consecutive terms. That is not a vanity project. You do not hold the same constituency for that long by coasting on name recognition. At some point, the voters are simply judging whether you showed up, whether you listened, whether you were present in ways that mattered.
He was known for walking peace marches through Bombay during communal flare-ups when the easier and safer thing would have been to stay home. He worked with communities that had no particular usefulness to him politically. People who spent time around him in those years tend to describe him the same way regardless of their own political leanings, which is itself a kind of testament.
Ghelani’s reference to integrity was not decoration. It was a conclusion that people who watched him closely had arrived at independently, over time.
The Last Time on Screen
Rajkumar Hirani cast him in Munna Bhai MBBS in 2003 alongside Sanjay Dutt. Father playing father to son playing son, more or less. On the surface it sounds like easy casting. In practice it gave the film an emotional undertow that Hirani could not have written into existence. Because by 2003, the audience already knew the real story. They knew what Sanjay Dutt had been through. They knew what his father had stood by him through. And watching the two of them share scenes carried a weight that existed entirely outside the screenplay.
The film is still beloved. It will probably outlast most things made in that decade. And part of why it holds is that Sunil Dutt in it is so completely himself. Unhurried. Warm. Not performing warmth but actually carrying it.
He passed away two years later. That film is his last frame.
June 6, Every Year
Sanjay Dutt is 65. He has been through enough for several lifetimes and has spoken publicly about most of it at one point or another. He is not a man who hides from his own history.
But these birthday posts are different. They are not confessional or reflective or shaped for an audience. They are just direct. Miss you. Love you. You are my pillar. The tense slides around a little because grief does that. It does not stay neatly in the past where it belongs.
There will be people who saw that post on Saturday and felt something shift in them, not because of who Sanjay Dutt is, but because of what it is to lose a parent and then arrive at their birthday every year with nothing to do except say the thing out loud into whatever space is available.
Sunil Dutt would have been 96 today. The industry remembered. The family remembered. And somewhere in a comment that talked about molds and integrity and the kind of man the world no longer seems to produce, somebody put into words the specific shape of what went missing in May 2005 and has not been filled since.
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- Ayesha Khan
- Ayesha Khan
- Ayesha Khan
- Ayesha Khan
