Om Puri's wife Nandita Puri livid at 'ghost video', calls Pak news anchor 'a jo...

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.

According to my sources, he (Aamir Liaquat) was given this from somebody in India ... This is disgraceful and in extremely bad taste

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.

“There were people who were after Om’s money and not very happy with the kind of adulation he got in the West because they aren’t successful. These people [behind this video] have hurt me, my son and the entire nation and film fraternity”

Nandita says that the people behind the ‘ghost video’ clearly are unhappy with the success that came Puri’s way. “The agenda is harassment, that’s all! There were people who were after Om’s money and not very happy with the kind of adulation he got in the West because they aren’t successful. These people [behind this video] have hurt me, my son and the entire nation and film fraternity. They are Namard. They must be some f***ing bl**dy castrated bas***ds to do such a thing. If you can’t face a man at his level, then don’t do anything when he is no more in this world. And what is all this bull***t – ghost and all? Who believes in all this? They are the same people, who, at the time of Om’s death, did not want me to conduct a postmortem... They were already planting a lot of stories and at the time when Om died, they must have realised that if they pull out such kind of stupid news in India, the nation will kill them because it was a very raw aspect. Once they realised that the news has died down a natural death, they got a Delhi guy to upload the video on Youtube. Interestingly, that guy just opened a Youtube account three days before and uploaded some rubbish and then this video. That’s how Aaj Tak got it.”

Angered by the fact that the motive behind it all is to malign Puri’s image, Nandita adds, “Here is a man who took the country to the Oscars. No other actor has given the country so much of honour as Om did and you are fooling around and playing such videos – this is a very serious matter because you are not only insulting the man, you are not only spreading false thing, which is a compete lie, you are also sending information to Pakistan in whatever way.”