Manoj Kumar wants to sue SRK

Dil mein mere hai dard ... is what '70s star Manoj Kumar is feeling after seeing Om Shanti Om .

While the chorus from the hit number dard-e-disco in the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer is sizzling screens across the country, a scene from the film has made the thespian hot under the collar.

So hot, in fact, that he wants to sue the filmmaker and Shah Rukh for "a clear-cut defamation and deliberate attempt to humiliate" him.

"I am hurt. Shah Rukh Khan has injured my soul. It's a conspiracy to humiliate and ridicule me. This is not filmmaking...My devotion to filmdom for the last 50 years has been insulted," said the Purab Aur Paschim star who had turned patriotism into an art on celluloid. He was referring to the 70's scene in OSO where his young double is beaten by police outside a theatre when he lands up for a premiere.

"Are the Mumbai police so stupid that they can't recognise Manoj Kumar and lathicharge him in the '70s when he was a star? It doesn't stop there. Inside the theatre too, the scene continues in the same vein. At another place where Shah Rukh is shown giving a mock thank-you speech in a drunken state, he says he is Manoj Kumar...," Kumar told TOI on Thursday, less than a week after 'OSO' hit the screens.

"If it was for humour it was okay, but to do it like this showed bad taste," he added. "A junior artist told me he had played my double. About two months back when I met Farah Khan I told her that if she had asked me I would have gladly appeared in the film. But she said it was only a double to portray him in '70s scene for a film premiere.

She was very respectful. She also said I looked lean and fit. I told her I was exercising. I even spoke to her husband." Kumar, who had won two Filmfare Awards in quick succession in 1972 and 1974 for Be-imaan (best actor) and Roti, Kapda Aur Makaan (best director), said though he has never celebrated his silver, gold or diamond jubilee he was "not a man to keep quiet when someone is hitting below the belt".

He said, "I am a peace-loving man. I don't like goondaism otherwise by now the film's banners and posters would have been torn."

Swati Deshpande, TNN