New Delhi: Bhaskaran K is no Amitabh Bachchan. So when his number was flashed on the screen, the girl whom the number actually belongs to, received no calls, when IBNLive contacted her.
(Spoiler alert!)
In Sujoy Ghosh's much applauded thriller Kahaani, Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan) after hacking into R Shridhar's (IT head at the National Data Centre, Kolkata) computer, finds a piece of code. Satyaki Sinha aka Rana (Parambrata Chatterjee), the Kolkata Police assistant sub-inspector who had been helping Vidya in the search for her 'missing' husband, deciphers it to be a mobile phone number based on the numbers corresponding to the letters on a BlackBerry phone keypad.
In the movie, the number is said to be that of Bhaskaran K (Dhritiman Chatterjee), commander-in-chief , Intelligence Bureau, New Delhi. But in the real world that number is apparently that of a Vodafone mobile subscriber in Delhi.
When IBNLive contacted her, she appeared surprised on knowing the Kahaani connection. She said that though she had watched the movie recently, it did not occur to her that that number, which plays a vital role in the movie, was actually hers. But at the same time, she doesn't think that it is a big deal and any number used in a movie could actually belong to someone else.
She, unlike the owner of the number that Amitabh Bachchan announced on Kaun Banega Crorepati, has not been inundated with calls was because that number appears very briefly on the screen. And even when A Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), the deputy chief at the Intelligence Bureau mutters the number, it is in the alphabetic code and not the actual number. Her phone might just start ringing a lot more when Kahaani releases on DVD.
Bangalore resident, Sarah Varghese, also faced a similar ordeal when her number found its way, thanks to a scriptwriter's imagination, to Aamir Khan's chiselled body in the 2008 blockbuster Ghajini.
Using fictitious numbers in movies and television shows is a standard practice in the west. In USA and Canada numbers with the prefix 555 are widely used in the entertainment industry. This is because the 555 area code is reserved for directory assistance applications in the North American Numbering Plan and therefore do not correspond with actual personal phone numbers.
If the owner of the number objects, the makers of Kahaani may find themselves in a Bruce Almighty-like situation. In the 2003 movie, God (Morgan Freeman) contacts Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) on his pager using an actual number, albeit without an area code. Following complaints from people who had been receiving calls asking to speak to God, the number was edited for the DVD and television releases.
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