Mystery of the red diary

The 1978 Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Don had an edge-of-the-seat stunt scene set in a Christian cemetery, where the villains try to snatch a red diary from the hero. The diary, we are told, contains the names of all the baddies inhabiting Mumbai’s underworld.

- R. PRASANNAN

The fight ends with the baddies throwing the diary into a burning car. (If they had shot in a shamshangarh, they wouldn’t have had to burn a car.) Bachchan then delivers the knockout line—that the diary that is burning is a nakli; the asli one, also red, is safe with him.

The Rajasthan assembly had an equally exciting red-diary scene last Monday. Its hero Rajendra Singh Gudha, dropped two days earlier from Ashok Gehlot’s cabinet, produced a diary of the same colour as Don Bachchan’s, and claimed it contained damning data about the crimes of his CM. The CM’s loyalists tore it from his hands, but Gudha claims to have a fairly good part of it still with him.