by Subhash K Jha

Mahesh Bhatt: "The world needs to be saved from such saviours of mankind."

Kalpana Lajmi: "I find the entire press report about Daya Nayak bizarre. He was once revered eulogized praised for exterminating high and low profile criminals in more than eighty encounters...He was suddenly accused of haiving links wth the same underworld which he had once helped tackle through the law?!

News persons are labeling him a criminal even without giving him an opportunity to defend himself. And now the anti-corruption bureau has discovered of disproportionate incomes in his premises!! What do we make of all this?! Was it planted by clever political forces to malign him? Or has another hero succumbed to greed and corruption?"

Sanjay Gupta: "I don't think he's absconding...There has to be some kind of mistake...From what I know of him him he won't run away from a situation. This man has been a hero and has done a lot of good."

Nikhil Advani: "This matter requires a serious investigation of the police system..What makes a decorated police office succumb to temptation? We've seen it happen often in the movies. But I guess life does imitate art, and vice versa."

Vipul Shah: "It's a very difficult case for me to understand this crisis. Sometimes I feel he's guilty, at other times I feel he's being framed. I'm not too sure if he's on the run or just biding his time. Such cases are always beyond the lay person's understanding.. I hope he finally emerges a clean guy because he was always looked up to as a hero. We can't bear to have one more fallen hero. If he is, he'll set the wrong example for society."

Ananth Mahadevan: "It's strange. I met up with the man when I was initially supposed to direct a film based on his life Kagaar.. What fascinated me wasn't so much his history of 'encounters' but the fact that after his legally sanctioned killings he went back to his doting family. It was this apect of his life—a wife living with a killer who's on the right side of the law-- that sparked off my late friend Sujit Sen's script for Kagaar. Daya Nayak spoke about some inquiry or the other against him long ago, and how he emerged clean from it.

Today all the talk of being clean seems questionable, with this supposedly fearless cop being accused of hobnobbing with shady anti-socials.

Is this how life takes you through a maze of dreams schemes and ambitions? And before you realize it you are a man on the run. I'm sure the man has a lot to say and the shit might hit the roof if he opens his mouth...But that one meeting with Daya Nayak made me realize cops are after all human. No matter how cocksure you are, life's vagaries are waiting around the corner to grab you...Before you know it you are confronted by your past karma. And you can't even shoot straight."

Shimit Amin: "Er...I was out of town.. I don't know anything about the case. May I get back to you?"