While still basking in the glow of accolades for his recent performances in Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Manjhi - The Mountain Man, Nawazuddin Siddiqui is gearing up to step into a completely different zone as an actor for his next.
On Tuesday, Mumbai Mirror reported that Siddiqui is all set to play Raman Raghav (aka 'Psycho Raman'), the deranged, real-life serial killer who, in the '60s, murdered several pavement- and hutment-dwellers on a whim in Bombay (now Mumbai). The film is to be directed by Anurag Kashyap, who, according to a small Box Office India report, wanted to use this story in the colossal disaster that was his most recent release, Bombay Velvet. They've also reported that the film is titled Raman Raghav 2.08.
Kashyap's next is all set to roll from September 25, with a 20-day schedule in Mumbai to kick things off.
Raghav, who committed two known series of murders in 1966 and 1968, is said to have been one of the most notorious serial killers in India. He would bludgeon his victims to death using a hard, blunt object. His activities had struck fear in the hearts of those who slept out in the open. Eventually, in '68, he was nabbed and sentenced to life imprisonment, on grounds of his supposedly incurable mental illness. He lived out the rest of his days in Yerwada Central Jail, Pune, before dying of kidney failure in 1995.
Kashyap's upcoming film won't be the first on this subject. Tamil director Bharathiraja's film Sigappu Rojakkal (1978), starring Kamal Haasan and Sridevi, was loosely inspired by Raman's grisly crimes. Meanwhile, director Sriram Raghavan (Ek Hasina Thi, Johnny Gaddar, Badlapur) had also made a 45-minute docu-drama on Raghav shortly after graduating from his alma mater, Film and Television Institute Of India, Pune.
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