Is Smita Patil's ghost haunting Prateik?

There’s an eerie story secretly doing the rounds among the cast and crew of My Friend Pinto. Apparently a lot of the crew members, including actor Prateik, director Raghav Dhar and producer Sanjay Leela Bhansali, felt late actor Smita Patil’s presence while shooting with her son Prateik.

There’s an eerie story secretly doing the rounds among the cast and crew of My Friend Pinto. Apparently a lot of the crew members, including actor Prateik, director Raghav Dhar and producer Sanjay Leela Bhansali, felt late actor Smita Patil’s presence while shooting with her son Prateik.

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“We don’t know what it was. But we certainly felt something. Smita inspired me to sign Prateik. I was a big fan of hers,” Bhansali says. Another crew member adds: “Not just Prateik or the director, many of us felt a presence. We don’t know what or who it was. But there was definitely something.”

For a sequence where Prateik’s character had to talk about his mother, the young actor expressed reservations. "Prateik didn’t want to do the scene where his character talks about his mother. We convinced him it was necessary. When Prateik finally did the sequence he went into a kind of trance while speaking his lines," says a source.

Speaking of the sequence, Bhansali says: “Prateik was so close to his own mother at that point that we could almost see her standing next to Prateik. Though I didn't have the good fortune of working with Smita, I saw her in every gesture in Prateik. The title and Prateik’s name in the film came from a Smita starrer Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai. Smita was there throughout the making of the film.”