Addressing the audience, Shekhar said, “Sanjay Dutt was put in an anda cell, yet he kept his sanity.” He then asked the actor, “Did you ever feel like ending your life in such situations?”

“Never,” Sanjay replied.

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Shekhar Suman went on to point out that people often fail to acknowledge their mistakes, but said Sanjay Dutt had accepted his own. He then asked the actor, “Which was the moment when you felt the weakest?”

“I knew my dad and family went through a lot of things. But I never felt weak,” Sanjay said.

Shekhar then asked, “What are you made of?” He listed some of the difficult experiences Sanjay had faced, saying, “He lost his mother. He lost his father. He lost his first wife. He went to a rehabilitation centre. He overcame fourth-stage cancer. He went behind bars multiple times. But yet, he is intact.”

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As the audience cheered, Sanjay Dutt recalled the first time he was handcuffed in front of his father, actor Sunil Dutt.

“When for the first time the police came and put handcuffs on me, my dad went into shock. With tears in his eyes, he said, ‘What are you doing with my son?’ I hugged him tight and told him, ‘Why are you letting these handcuffs bother you? Don’t be like that. It is just a procedure, please don’t be upset.’ While in reality, it was killing me from the inside. But I had to be strong for him,” he recalled.

He added, “That’s how I moved throughout this trial. It went on for 24 years.”

When Shekhar Suman asked him where he found the strength to get through the ordeal, Sanjay Dutt responded with a chant of “Har Har Mahadev.”

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‘They thought they could break me’

Sanjay Dutt also recalled being lodged in cells alongside other criminals and said that his years of privilege never made him feel superior to those around him. “You know, for so many years, I am not someone who is egoistic about his stardom. I don’t have that in me,” he said.

The actor credited his parents’ decision to send him to The Lawrence School, Sanawar, with shaping his outlook on life.

“So many times, we have sat on the ground on a set and have eaten food. I sat with workers so many times to eat food on set. I don’t care about these things,” he said.

According to Sanjay Dutt, the authorities believed that taking away the comforts associated with his celebrity status would eventually break him. “But nothing happened to me. Because I didn’t break. They went in shock. Unki phat gayi. They mocked me. One of them came to me and said, ‘You won’t get any cigarette here. Now, what will you do?’ So my reply was, ‘Sir, yahan bidi toh milegi,'” he recalled.

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“All these changes didn’t bother me, so they got tensed that how is he so grounded and unaffected,” the actor added.

Sanjay Dutt’s prison terms

Sanjay Dutt was first arrested on April 19, 1993, in connection with the 1993 Bombay serial blasts case and faced charges under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) and the Arms Act over the illegal possession of weapons linked to the case.

Sanjay spent around 18 months in jail as an undertrial across different periods before being granted bail by the Supreme Court in October 1995. In 2007, a special TADA court cleared him of terrorism-related charges but convicted him under the Arms Act and sentenced him to six years in prison.

In 2013, the Supreme Court upheld his conviction under the Arms Act but reduced his sentence from six years to five. Sanjay Dutt surrendered in May that year to serve the remainder of his sentence and was released from Pune’s Yerawada Central Jail on February 25, 2016, after receiving remission for good conduct.