Several years before he co-starred with Manoj Bajpayee in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, Pankaj Tripathi had a memorable encounter with his idol that involved stealing a pair of his slippers. On a recent appearance on The Kapil Sharma Show, Manoj Bajpayee jokingly brought up the time Pankaj admitted to the deed. The Sacred Games actor went on to explain and even choked up towards the end.
Back when Pankaj was a struggling theatre actor, Manoj Bajpayee checked into the hotel in which he was working as a kitchen staff supervisor. When Pankaj found out, he decided to personally deliver his orders to his room. “I met bhaiyya (Manoj) and said, ‘I also work in theatre’, touched his feet and left,” he explained. The next day, Manoj Bajpayee checked out and the housekeeping staff found a pair of slipper that he had left behind. When they told Pankaj, he promptly said, “Don’t get rid of it, give it to me!”
“Kyun? Eklavya ki tarah agar main inke khadau mein apna paer daal lu (Why? If like Eklavya I, too, could put my feet in his slippers.),” an emotional Pankaj said in his defence and got up and hugged Manoj.
Pankaj Tripathi was most recently seen as gangster Ganesh Gaitonde’s ‘teesra baap (third father)’ Guruji in season two of Netflix web series Sacred Games. He has several films in the pipeline, including Angrezi Medium, 83 and Kargil Girl. Manoj Bajpayee stars as a middle-class guy who also happens to be a world-class spy, in Family Man, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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