Director Raj Kumar Santoshi has the knack of being in the news but for the wrong reasons. These days, he is mostly bin the news for announcing films which he never ends up making. Take the case of his recent film Halla Bol, which is set for release in January. The film was believed to have been conceived a decade ago with Shah Rukh Khan in the lead.

Apparently, the idea for Halla Bol had struck Santoshi some 10-12 years ago, or so he says. He had at that point of time narrated the script to Shah Rukh Khan who had liked it a lot. Bharat Shah was supposed to produce the film. But after that Shah ran into his own legal problems and SRK and the director both got busy with other projects and drifted apart. Years later, Santoshi revived the project, but this time with Ajay Devgan in the lead. According to Santoshi, when he recently met SRK, the actor told him that he was glad that Ajay had done the film. When quizzed if Halla Bol had shades of Mephisto, Santoshi said that nobody had seen the film as yet so it was ridiculous of them to make assumptions. According to him, he is not a DVD chor and that Halla Bol is an original film. He also made it clear, once and for all, that the film was not based on the Jessica Lal case or Aamir Khan's Gujarat story. He also made it clear that he had just two film in pre-production stage, Ramayan and Ashoka. Elaborating on directors picking lifting stories from DVDs of foreign movies, Santoshi said it was appalling how some of Bollywood's leading directors blatantly copy from DVds and then attend award functions proudly. He claimed that when he was inspired by a creative work, he bought the rights to it. In fact, Santoshi has recently acquired the rights of the famous play, Jiss Lahore Nahin Dekhiya written by Dr Asghar Wajahat. The play is about a Muslim family which migrates to Lahore after Partition. Jiss Lahore Nahin Dekhiya was written as a story and later adapted into a play and staged more than 500 times.