Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; December 22, 2015)

Puneet Issar met Manmohan Desai on the sets of Naseeb. The filmmaker wanted to record something and was looking for a martial arts artiste with a good voice. Yash Johar, who was a friend of Puneet's father, director Sudesh Issar, took him to Desai, who was impressed with not just his baritone and black belt, but also his personality and perfect-10 physique, and decided to cast him as the main villain in his next film, Coolie, again featuring Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor.

July 26, 1982... it was Puneet's first day on the sets and his first shot. They were canning a well rehearsed action sequence in which Bachchan and he were supposed to trade punches. A mistimed jump and a punch that should have been dodged took the Big B down with a ruptured intestine. And made Puneet Issar infamous!

"He'd been rushed from Bangalore to Mumbai's Breach Candy Hospital for an emergency splenectomy. I read newspaper reports of his deteriorating condition and panicked," reminisces Puneet, who was invited by the actor to the hospital. "I went with my wife who donated blood for him. He had always been my hero and seeing him so weak and ill, weighing hardly 50 kgs, I was guilt-stricken."

Bachchan realised what Puneet was feeling and tried to convince him he wasn't at fault. In a hoarse whisper he narrated how, for a Prakash Mehra film, he was supposed to throw a glass at Vinod Khanna. The timing went awry during the take and the glass hit Vinod on the chin, cutting it open. He needed four stitches but reassured Bachchan, pointing out that it had been an accident.

"I understand what you are going through and I can only repeat Vinod's words to me. Relax, it was an accident," Bachchan told Puneet, putting a comforting arm around his shoulder and walking him to where fans and the media waited to convince everyone that the "kid" was not to blame.

Once, when Puneet was exiting the hospital, a group of ladies stopped him to enquire about their idol's health. "Do you know someone tried to kill him, if that person ever comes in front of me, I'll kill him," insisted one of them, little realising that the young man, who was suddenly intent on making a quick, exit was the 'culprit'.

Six months later, Bachchan returned to work at Chandivali Studio. They started from where they had left off. This time everything went off well. And Puneet continued to learn from the man he idolised. "Once, I saw him sitting in a corner of a stifling hot studio in Chennai, wrapped in a blanket, going over his lines and wondered if he wasn't feeling hot. He said he would if he thought about it, it was all in the mind," smiles Puneet, remembering how between shots, they would play cricket, with him trying to get Desai out. "If Manji hadn't become a movie maker he would have been India's no. 1 batsman."

Coolie opened on November 14, 1983, to a rousing reception. The fight sequence was frozen at the point of impact with a superimposed message. Desai rewrote the ending with Bachchan's character cheating death on screen too.

Puneet, the monster who had almost killed the demi-God, continued to be flooded with hate mail. Several makers dropped him and it was a six-year struggle for the actor till he got a call to audition for BR Chopra's TV serial, Mahabharata. Puneet, who was a speech, diction and method acting professor at Roshan Taneja's acting school, impressed the veteran director and landed the role of Bheem. "But I wanted to play Duryodhana; that was the performance-oriented role and would give me a chance to break out of the image of a fighter. I finally convinced them to let me play the eldest of the Kauravas. We started shooting towards the end of '88 and finally my luck turned. I'm still remembered for that near-fatal hit but now people agree that it wasn't deliberate. It was destiny," he signs off.