Sobhraj is famously litigatious and has a proclivity for issuing self-aggrandising statements and giving interviews from prison. It is a fictionalised account, which is why I didn’t need to seek permission to make the film.” “The basic idea is to do justice to the determination of people involved in the case. “The movie is about a jail break and the subsequent police investigation,” said Raman, who has previously directed Gayab and 404. The movie is set in the ’70s and ’80s, and also stars Richa Chadha as a lawyer who is drawn by Sobhraj’s animal magnetism. Raman clarified that Main Aur Charles is not a biopic but “an account of a chargesheet”. “Instead, I was dazzled by a brilliant psychopath.” “I had come to Delhi with some vague theory of Charles as a child of colonialism revenging himself on the counter-culture,” Neville, a prominent figure of the Australian counter-culture himself and the co-editor of the magazine Oz, writes in the epilogue. Although Sobhraj later disowned the book – he is a man who likes to be in charge of his mythos – Neville and Clarke had no doubt about his culpability. But his feelings about the subcontinent, as reported by Richard Neville and Julie Clarke in the book Charles Sobhraj, weren’t exactly positive: “How he hated India, except as a land of easy pickings, and although its blood flowed through his veins, he rarely acknowledged it.”Ĭharles Sobhraj is based on extensive interviews conducted with the frequent felon in Tihar Jail in 1977, when he was on trial for a failed attempt to rob a French tour group. In 1975, after escaping from a Greek prison, Sobhraj boarded a plane to India for only his second extended trip to the country. Sobhraj is now 71, and has been serving time in a Nepalese prison since 2003 for murders committed there during the ’70s. Sobhraj wanted to remain in an Indian prison to avoid being extradited to Thailand, where he faced a possible death rap for a series of brutal murders committed in the mid-1970s, and he manipulated the Indian judicial system with the same ease with which he twisted the confidence of countless family members, victims and girlfriends over the course of two decades. Written and directed by Prawaal Raman, the October 30 release stars Randeep Hooda as the man who walked out of Tihar Jail in 1986 and then engineered his re-arrest to buy himself more jail time. Sobhraj’s exploits include several audacious jailbreaks, one of which is the basis of the upcoming movie Main Aur Charles. India was where his father had relatives and maintained one of two households, where Charles Sobhraj first arrived to spend time with an extended family he had never met before, where he committed fraud, robbery and murder, and where he was arrested and sentenced for lengthy periods. The half-Sindhi and half-Vietnamese criminal despised his Indian heritage, and used the country as one massive crime scene. But if India has not rushed to embrace Charles Sobhraj as one of its own, it is with good reason. An international man of mystery of Indian extraction is a rarity.
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