When Hirani turned down Aamir Khan

Had things gone a different way, we might have seen Aamir Khan playing a man hallucinating about Mahatma Gandhi instead of Munnabhai taking gyan from the father of the nation in Lagey Raho Munnabhai.

“He (Aamir) said he was keen to work with me after Munnabhai MBBS and inquired whether I was working on any script. I replied in affirmative saying I was working on one and would take a couple of months before narrating it to him,” director Rajkumar Hirani tells a news agency.

“I was working on a script about a man hallucinating about Gandhiji. He had met Gandhiji in the 40s and then went into coma. This was the idea that I was developing. The story was becoming serious and then I realised what if Munnabhai met Gandhiji, the story would be light hearted,” Hirani added.

Thus, ‘Lagey Raho Munnabhai’ took shape and Sanjay Dutt was roped in instead of Aamir Khan.

But Aamir’s wish to work with Hirani came true in the director’s third film 3 Idiots. The perfectionist Khan suited the lead role but Hirani still felt embarrassed while approaching Aamir for it because he had turned down the actor previously.

“When we met again for '3 Idiots' he recalled that I had refused to work with him. I was embarrassed as I was honest with him that time,” Hirani recalled.

In ‘3 Idiots’ Aamir plays a 22-year-old college student along with Madhavan and Sharman Joshi. Though the movie is inspired from Chetan Bhagat’s novel ‘Five Point Someone’, Hirani says the script has been altered so much that very little of the book now remains in the film.