A video claiming that late actor Om Puri’s ghost has been spotted haunting the area around his Mumbai residence, went viral over the weekend after it was played on a leading news channel.
The actor’s wife, Nandita Puri, is livid at those behind it. Talking exclusively to Hindustan Times, she says: “We are getting the intelligence to track it down.”
The video first aired on January 15 on Pakistan’s Bol News Channel, where anchor Aamir Liaquat claimed that Puri’s ghost had been seeking revenge from Ajit Doval, India’s National Security Adviser.
The theory might be a result of Om Puri’s comments on Indian soldiers after the Uri attack. He had said in a television interview that soldiers choose to be in the army and nobody forces them to do so.
Nandita says that the video is scripted. “Aamir Liaquat is a joker in Pakistan, who has survived a lot of these cheap thrills earlier too.
According to my sources, he was given this from somebody in India and there are many people involved who have scripted this whole thing, which is disgraceful and in extremely bad taste.
The video was shot in a night vision CCTV camera and we have traced down the building. Of course it’s not where Om lived. He won’t live in a shoddy building, but it’s very close to our house,” she says.
Elaborating that the video has goof-ups to get the suspects caught, Nandita adds, “If you notice, an Indian news reader will use sensitised words but when a Pakistan news reader is reading, he won’t say things like Aatma Ki Shanti and all, so it’s a script from India, which has gone there.”
Om Puri — who died on January 6, 2017 — was a renowned name in the Indian film industry as well as the West. Homage was paid to the legend in the memoriam montage at the Oscars ceremony held in February this year.
