Bollywood PR specialist Dale Bhagwagar (who handles the media for prominent stars like Hrithik Roshan, Vivek Oberoi, Randeep Hooda and films of Ritesh Sidhwani-Farhan Akhtar and Ashok Amritraj) almost threw a ‘hissy’ fit after getting the shock of his life when he found a half-metre long snake hiding in the kitchen of his house in Madh Island.
The spin-doctor works late nights and got up from his computer to make some tea at 2am, he spotted this greenish-brown reptile wrapped around the kitchen sink pipe. “First, I thought my house staff might have played a prank on me and that it might be a rubber toy or a piece of rope appearing like a snake. But then it started moving a bit,” Dale said with a tinge of amusement.
And though the snake was not large in size, the publicist admits, he did get the creeps about how to get it out of his house. “I thought I’d leave it there to tackle the issue in the morning, but then I didn’t fancy the prospect of trying to go to sleep knowing there was a snake loose in my house,” he said. “Luckily, it was moving very slowly.”
Using his presence of mind, the publicist opened his microwave and took out the steel grilling stick from it and tried to wrap the snake around while pinning it down with a cardboard box. “All this while, I was just hoping it was a non-venomous snake. I was even surprised that it didn’t try to wriggle away, as if it was too lazy,” Dale grinned.
Though he couldn’t pick it up with the grill stick, the publicist managed to slide it in the cardboard box, and stuck the box with tape. He drove to the nearby Aksa beach in Madh, where he removed the tape and hurled the box into some shrubs near the beach.
Coincidently, one of Dale’s ex-clients Shilpa Shetty was shooting a night shift along with Sunny Deol for his directorial venture ‘The Man’ at one of the bungalows just outside the publicist’s Madh Island colony at the same time. And he did think of being mischievous and going up to her with the “lazy snake” to scare her a bit. But he gave up the idea. “I guess, she would have had me beaten up by the spot boys if I’d done that,” Dale joked.