Did Ragini fake it?

On Gokulashtami (birth of Lord Krishna), we reported how Ragini Khanna aka Bharti (Bhaskar’s alter-ego) of Bhaskar Bharti impressed us by announcing that she would break the handi all by herself. But what we saw on air stumped us. The sequence was not just badly canned but the actress did not even climb the first tier of the pyramid as promised. It was certainly a dupe who did the stunt. Though this is a common practice on many shows but this fact is never hidden by the actors themselves. Almost all of them agree that the stunt was not performed by them. In this case Ragini insisted that she had performed the act herself. In an earlier chat with TellyChakkar Ragini had said, “Yes, I did break the handi. This will be a special one hour episode.” When we asked her if she was apprehensive about doing such a stunt? “Yes, it does scare you but one needs to have a positive attitude in life and constantly push oneself to judge one’s competence. The entire sequence really left me thrilled”, she added. After which we saw the episode and noticed that Ragini had chickened out. We contacted her to know what had gone wrong. And this is what she said, “We have had five shots for the handi breaking sequence. Infact, I had attempted something scarier than climbing a human pyramid. I climbed a ladder about the height of a two-storey building. I could have fallen flat and hurt myself badly if any mishap had occurred. You can’t expect me to climb it at one go so we had to do retakes to can the perfect shot.” But if indeed it was her who was doing the stunt why did they only show her back and missed out on the emotions that crossed her face? “I would advise you to download the entire episode and see it again. It’s indeed me who has done the stunt. We had used the dupe but only for two scenes, one for the wide angle and the other for the last shot.” An actor who was present during the sequence said, “She had climbed the ladder upto the first floor. I don’t think an actress can dare to attempt something like this. Even a layman can easily make out in the final master that a dupe was used. But if she is still maintaining that she had climbed it upto two floors, I can hardly say anything on it.” Well we checked the episode again and stick to our story. And now we leave it to the readers to check out the Aug 13 episode for themselves. We would love to hear from you…