Prabhal Baruah owes his eight-year-long CID writing career to a medical checkup. At Mumbai’s Breach Candy Hospital for a series of tests in 2001, he found out that former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was undergoing a knee surgery there at the same time. He began thinking about the challenges of setting a murder mystery at a hospital, a place with a vast campus and several entry points, but also a place currently housing a VVIP, which meant Z-level security. “You go through a whole security check to enter, there are CCTV cameras everywhere, you can’t smuggle in even a penknife,” he says. “So how can someone bring a bomb into the hospital to kill someone?” At the time, Baruah was an executive producer at Sony Entertainment. He pitched the idea to B.P. Singh at the office parking lot, who then insisted Baruah write the episode. One month and eight drafts later, Baruah had his story of a VIP admitted to a speciality hospital, only to die when a bomb explodes in his room. How is it assembled? Through gunpowder smuggled into sealed tablet packets and syringes filled with acid, while a dose of sleeping pills knocks out the victim.
Unshot CID episode
“Some of the best stories we planned were never made — and those are the ones I tend to remember more,” says Shridhar Raghavan, who wrote for CID on and off for nearly a decade. Some of his favourite unshot episodes include one set entirely on a high-rise ledge involving a potential suicide and another in which the cops have to solve a murder at a vipasana centre…without saying a word out loud. After Ashutosh Gowariker, who played senior inspector Virendra, announced that he would have to leave to begin filming Lagaan (2001), Raghavan wrote him an exit episode, in which his character died. “He wasn’t too keen on being killed off so he could potentially return to the show in case the film didn’t work out, so I wrote another exit for him,” said Raghavan. Aditya Srivastava, who joined as senior inspector Abhijeet that same year, wasn’t keen on doing more than a few episodes of CID initially. To convince him, Raghavan narrated the “death of a cop” episode he had written for Gowariker and told him that anytime he wanted out, this was his ticket. The episode remains unshot.