 "Varun Dhawan recalls ‘scary’ underworld threat that forced family to leave home: 'Come meet me in that garden; I’ll beat you there'")
Varun Dhawan has opened up about a chilling incident from the 1990s, when his family received an underworld threat that escalated to the point of forcing them to leave their home.
A tense time for Bollywood
Recalling the episode, Varun said the threat call came during a period when the Hindi film industry was grappling with frequent extortion attempts and intimidation from the underworld.
The call was directed at his father, filmmaker David Dhawan, and quickly turned serious enough for the family to take it as a real danger. “We were getting them too. We had been receiving them for quite some time, but we didn’t realise it because the staff were arguing with whoever was calling. The staff even gave out our full address and told the person where to meet, ‘Come meet me in that garden; I’ll beat you there.”
According to Varun, the situation “went out of hand,” prompting them to leave their house for safety. Interestingly, Varun described part of the incident as bizarre in hindsight.
“He said that this had gone out of hand and that the person was now saying he would come with guns and that he knew our address and office timings. When my dad asked who had said this, he took the staff member’s name. So we had to leave our house and stay somewhere else that day. It is funny, but it is not funny actually,” he recalled.
When fear was part of the industry
The actor’s recollection sheds light on a darker chapter of Bollywood, when threats and extortion calls were not uncommon. Several high-profile incidents during that era had already created an atmosphere of fear across the industry, making such calls impossible to ignore.
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