A Day In The Life Of A REAL Jasoos

'Vidya Balan puts on a lot of disguises in a short span of time in Bobby Jasoos but that doesn’t happen in real life.'

Private Detective Rajani Pandit tells us what does happen in real life.

“Viday Balan did a brilliant job in Bobby Jasoos. The story is also good.”

Rich words of praise from real-life detective Rajani Pandit, who recently caught up with the jasoosi film.

Pandit, 47, has spent more than 25 years as a private detective in Mumbai, and attempts to analyse the film closely.

“The problem lies in the execution,” Pandit continues. “Vidya puts on a lot of disguises in a short span of time but that doesn’t happen in real life. Normally, when we get involved in a case, we follow it with just one disguise.”

.

“Vidya’s character in the film is more interested in money rather than knowing how genuine the case is,” Pandit adds. “We detectives don’t work for money. I have not come into this profession for name, fame or money. I want to help people. Only if the case is genuine, we take it up.

“Many people have come and offered me huge sums of money but if I don’t find them genuine, I don’t take up their work.

“When we take up a case, we first run a background check on the person who has approached us. Once a man came to me and asked me to find out where a certain girl lived, as he suspected that her parents had held her in captivity at an unknown place.

“When he was talking to me, I found his body language suspicious. I told him to come after two days.

“In those two days, I found out that the girl was happily married. I enquired about the guy who approached me and found out that he was her ex-boyfriend and wanted to harm her. Although I was getting good money, I didn’t take up the case.”

Vidya, however, does not run a background check on Kiran Kumar’s character in Bobby Jasoos, when he approaches her with a case to find a girl.

Like Vidya’s character, Pandit has also gone undercover in her cases. Once, she worked as a domestic help in a murder case.

“A family had come to me with a case where they suspected the mother of killing her son. This lady had employed two massage ladies and through them, I approached her and took up a job as a maid in the house.

“For more than a month, I couldn’t gather any evidence against the lady. At that time, I just had a simple tape recorder.

“One day, I found her interacting with a man who had murdered her son on her behalf. They had a big argument and he said he would never return.

“As luck would have it, he turned up again after two months. The lady got angry and told him that he should not come there, as the police were keeping an eye on her.

“I thought this was my only chance to catch the man red-handed. We didn’t have mobile phones then and I needed to contact the police.

“I got an idea and dropped a knife on my foot and it started bleeding. I went to her and she told me to go down and get my foot bandaged. I quickly left and called my client, who came with the police and caught the guy.

“The lady didn’t get suspicious about me, so I continued working there for another three months. I gathered more evidence against her and later, she was also jailed.”

On another occasion, Pandit disguised herself as a beggar, just like Vidya did in Bobby Jasoos (above).

“A couple came to me with a problem, about their son. They complained that he would leave the house at 2 am everyday and return after some time,” she says.

“They owned four cars and the boy would use a different car every day. He was a very rash driver and it was impossible to catch him. We found his daily route and planted some men on the way.

“He would go outside a five star hotel and put some money in a beggar’s bowl and pick up something.

“I decided to dress up like a beggar, and find out. I learnt that he was buying drugs from the beggars.”

Pandit became a detective thanks to her father. He was a CID inspector, who had worked on the Mahatma Gandhi murder case. Since she had a keen sense of observation, Pandit did some amateur detective work before she finally took it up as a career.

Many of Pandit’s clients are television and film celebrities, and a majority of them want to know if their partners are cheating on them.

She gets a lot of death threats as well, but she rattles off in filmi style: “Darr naam ka shabd meri dictionary mein nahi hai (Fear is not a word in my dictionary).”