Real life policemen and women have inspired many a Bollywood flick from the fictional dare devil lady cop acts in the Kiran Bedi inspired eighties and nineties to the more realistic cop sagas on Mumbai’s infamous encounter specialists, post Satya. As Black Friday puts the spotlight on a new set of star cops, here’s a take on famous policemen in Hindi films down the years.

YC Pawar: Om Puri’s no nonsense angry cop act in Ardh Satya was said to have been inspired by Mumbai’s the then Additional Commissioner of Police (ACP) YC Pawar, who became famous for driving out the central Mumbai based don Vardharajan Mudaliar. Mani Ratnam’s Nayakan glorified and changed the way we looked at Mudaliar, though Pawar’s celluloid interpretations continued the tough cop image in the portrayals of Nasser (Nayakan) and Aditya Pancholi in the film’s Hindi remake Dayavan.

Kiran Bedi: India’s first lady IPS officer Kiran Bedi’s success story spun forth quite a few spirited lady cop lead acts in the 80s and 90s from Hema Malini’s Andha Kanoon to Rekha’s Phool Bane Angarey including Vijayashanti’s national award winner Karthavyam (remade as Tejaswini in Hindi). However, the closest that came to telling a believable story, allegedly inspired by Bedi’s life, was Kavita Chaudhary’s popular tele-series Udaan.

D Shivanandan: The soft spoken former joint commissioner of Mumbai police perhaps courted maximum media buzz when Ram Gopal Varma inked in the Malayalam superstar Mohanlal to reprise a character based on him in his underworld saga Company, inspired by the Dawood Ibrahim-Chota Rajan split. For once the Mumbai police didn’t complain about on-screen portrayal.

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