It may be a cult film today. Back then, it was insanity. NASEERUDDIN SHAH looks back on the gritty elation of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro

SATISH SHAH clad in a burqa being wheeled along on roller skates by Ravi Baswani and myself on the crisscrossed pavement of Napean Sea Road and remarking that all his fillings seemed to have turned loose. The entire unit asleep in their positions awaiting the arrival of Bhakti Barve at 3 am, returning to shoot in Alibagh after a stage performance in Bombay. Organising a coffin to come barreling down Malabar Hill, then moving back uphill from the direction it came. The costume person being dispatched to Goregaon from Marine Drive at three in the morning to collect the laundered white suits which were needed but hadn’t been delivered. Discovering, after boarding a local train which wouldn’t stop till the next station, that my camera had been filched on the platform. Spoofing the Mahabharata on practically empty stomachs, arguing about logic in the telephone scene — just a few of the myriad memories of the making of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro that shall never fail to turn me moist-eyed and nostalgic