The Opposition may have seized it as another electoral stick to beat the Modi government with. But, unlike electoral bonds or the EVM, the vaccine war may not remain an ephemeral poll debate and may be around well beyond June 4. A chance conversation with actor Shreyas Talpade was worrying. Shreyas was hospitalised in December after an unexpected heart attack. Unexpected because he doesn’t smoke, rarely drinks and has always been fit. He’s not diabetic either. It was just another normal day of shooting for Welcome To The Jungle, perhaps a little more strenuous than most days. But it didn’t warrant what happened that evening when he went home. Shreyas felt uneasy enough to have a word with his doctor, who urged him to go to the hospital. Neither he nor wife Dipti ever imagined that he’d have a heart attack. But that’s exactly what happened, requiring emergency medical attention and intervention.

Shreyas had an angioplasty and several weeks of rest before returning to work. But the thought of “wonder why it happened” was never far from his mind. With reports of the after-effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine now, it has got him wondering if his heart condition had anything to do with the vaccine shots that he, like a billion other Indians, took in 2021/22. “I was hale and hearty before that,” he ruminated, unsure of where his doubt will take him. But that doubt has taken seed in his mind. It may be the first time Shreyas has voiced his concern openly but one is sure that this will continue to be a contentious topic.

Meanwhile, a welcome outcome of the health scare was the realisation that he had a wealth of goodwill around him — the love and concern that came his way overwhelmed the actor. It was also a good time to take stock of where he stood in his career. His post-health-scare innings takes off with the curiously titled Kartam Bhugtam, a psychological thriller. It’s a lead role in a film that’s releasing at a time when controlled budgets are making better business sense than unwieldy projects. Sensibly-priced movies like Rajkummar Rao’s Srikanth and Manoj Bajpayee’s Bhaiyaji are generating much interest.

Later, Kangana Ranaut’s Emergency will see Shreyas playing Atal Bihari Vaj- payee, another interesting assignment that, irrespective of the film’s box office, will add variety to the actor’s kitty.

Most of all, there’s a huge difference between a dubbing assignment he did in 2021 and one that he’s poised to do in 2024. In 2021, when Shreyas was tapped to do the Hindi dialogues for Allu Arjun in an unknown Telugu film titled Pushpa: The Rise, he’d taken it lightly and hadn’t taken the producers’ offer to fly to Hyderabad to watch it. He had finally seen half of it on his laptop, on his way to a shoot, and the rest on his way back. But Allu’s livewire performance had made him sit up and he had dubbed, fully charged. “The swag was already there in Allu Arjun’s performance. I just had to voice it,” he recalled. He’d added a bit of Marathi slang like “Tujha aila” to give the Hindi version a flavour of its own.

Nobody needs reminding what a big hit it was with his dubbing giving the hero an additional swagger. Pushpa 2: The Rule is on its way. A tiny teaser with Mika and Nakash Aziz singing Pushpa, Pushpa, Pushpa... and Shreyas mouthing just one line over a mobile phone crossed three million hits within hours only in Hindi. The dubbing is still to be done but Pushpa, releasing on August 15 in six languages including Bengali, is now a high-value assignment.

Shreyas’s second innings is thus going to be action-packed.

Meanwhile, I don’t know about the vaccine. But kartam bhugtam, the universal concept of what goes around, comes around, will be unravelling on many fronts, in the weeks to come.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author