Director-producer Umesh Mehra revealed that roughly 40 years before Shah Rukh Khan's 2023 hit Pathaan, Yash Chopra had planned his own film titled Pathan as a Soviet-Indian co-production, a project shelved when the Afghanistan-Russia conflict broke out.
A companion project, a Gulzar-written and directed film on poet Mirza Ghalib, also collapsed, reportedly because its poetry-driven script wouldn't translate across languages.
Mehra says the title rights to Pathan now belong to Yash Raj Films, and recounted how the same Moscow layover produced 1980's Alibaba Aur 40 Chor, handed to him on the spot by his father.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.