My most amazing movie experience

It was sometime in the year 2000 or 2001 that I was visiting my good friend Sumit Singhal in Omaha, Nebraska. I used to live in Kansas City, Kansas at that time and since Omaha was just 3 hrs drive, we were able to meet each other every now and then. Sumit and I share one passion for sure - Hindi Movies and so in one of my visits to Omaha, we were watching the all time classic - Sholay - on DVD. Like most Sholay fans, I had watched the movie umpteen number of times and this was the umpteenth + 1 and so I probably remembered each and every frame of the movie by this time.

Remember the last sequence where Viru is beating the crap out of Gabbar and when he is about to dabao his tetua with a danda - Thakur plays spoilsport with "Viru, Gabbar ko mere hawale kar do..." and uses Jai's waada to finally persuade Viru to handover Gabbar to him...

Watch this sequence - if you are a true Sholay fan, you will know what I am talking about when I say this is the most amazing movie experience I have ever had!

Just in case you haven't realized - Gabbar dies instead of the cop turning up to play spoilsport one more time!! This was the original Sholay climax but was later changed when censor board objected to it - can you believe those times in the 1970s. The censor board objected to a scene where a hard core criminal like Gabbar was crushed the way he should be crushed! Well, Indian censor board doesn’t control the US market and so we were able to watch this version by accident.

I specially like the part of the sequence where Thakur breaks down in Viru's arms - showing the immense pain burried in his heart - getting some sort of closure with Gabbar's death.

This was the most amazing movie experience that I have ever had – I was just short of pinching myself to figure out if what I just saw was for real. Later doing research on internet, I figured out this is the way Sholay’s climax was supposed to be and all this while we were watching “an alternate ending”!