A tree on set, a panauti for life: Bajpayee's old anecdote about Nawazuddin Siddiqui resurfaces

A two-decade-old Manoj Bajpayee remark about Nawpayee Nawazuddin Siddiqui's first walk-on — as a tree — has re-entered circulation, and the actor is leaning into the 'panauti' label rather than flinching from it.

By Monexus Staff Writerasia5-minute read12 Jun 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

On 12 June 2026, The Indian Express republished a long-circulated Manoj Bajpayee recollection about his contemporary Nawazuddin Siddiqui's earliest days on a Hindi film set: the younger actor, between small parts, was pressed into playing a tree, and from that point forward acquired a reputation on that particular production as a "panauti" — Hindi film slang, roughly, for someone whose presence on set is held to bring the project bad luck. The anecdote is unremarkable as gossip. What makes it worth pausing on is the public posture both men have taken towards it in the years since: Bajpayee telling the story without varnish, and Siddiqui reportedly embracing the label rather than disclaiming it.

The fact that the line is still being told — by Bajpayee, to a mainstream Indian English outlet, two decades after the events it describes — is the small cultural fact underneath the anecdote. Indian film journalism has a long memory, and the audience for a particular kind of self-deprecating, blue-collar Bollywood origin story is evidently still buying.

The original set, and the people on it

The Indian Express piece does not specify the title of the production on which Siddiqui played the tree, and the thread from which this article is built provides no further detail. What it does confirm, in Bajpayee's own framing, is that the future star of Gangs of Wasseypur and The Lunchbox was at the time working as a junior walk-on — a job category in Hindi cinema that historically absorbed tens of thousands of aspiring actors a year, the overwhelming majority of whom never progressed beyond a few crowd-scene days. The story fits the broader shape of Siddiqui's documented early career: extensive small-part work through the 2000s, the breakthrough in Black Friday (2004) and Dev.D (2009), and the late surge into leading-man status across the 2010s.

The "panauti" tag, in set parlance, attaches to a person who is jokingly blamed when a shoot goes wrong — a light cue fails, a prop breaks, the light changes, a director shouts cut. In a working environment as superstitious as Indian film crews, the figure is real enough to be a recurring character in trade-press reminiscences, and benign enough to be laughed off by the person on the receiving end.

Why the label stuck — and why Siddiqui didn't fight it

Indian trade journalism has, for years, carried a small genre of "Nawazuddin-as-underdog" profiles. The Indian Express piece slots into that genre. The narrative arc is consistent across them: a small-town Uttar Pradesh migrant with a NSD training pedigree, a face that did not fit the 1990s leading-man template, and an unembarrassed willingness to take the parts that more successful contemporaries would not. Bajpayee's recollection adds a single line to that arc — a specific, dateless, low-stakes moment on an unnamed set, recalled with affection, and absorbed by the subject of it with the same affection.

The reason the line is worth reading is not gossip. It is what both men are signalling by telling it. Bajpayee, by now a National Award winner and a fixture of the art-house and OTT Hindi mainstream, is reaching back to a moment when his colleague was further down the ladder than he was. Siddiqui, by not denying or distancing himself from the story, is treating the early indignities of an acting life as something to be displayed rather than smoothed over. The Indian press has generally followed the same convention, recycling the line in profile pieces without irony or disbelief.

The audience for this kind of recall

The piece runs in a long-standing Indian Express strand of soft celebrity profiles, the kind of material that circulates on aggregator sites and on social platforms serving Hindi-film audiences. That audience is overwhelmingly domestic — readers who already know the rough shape of the careers in question and are looking for texture, not news. The re-circulation of the line is, in that sense, a sign of a functioning Hindi-film press ecosystem: small, name-recognisable actors, long memories, and a readership that treats a thirty-year-old crew-floor anecdote as still legible.

The broader structural fact underneath that ecosystem is the way Indian film celebrity has stabilised since the OTT era began. The 1990s Hindi film industry was, in crew-floor terms, a more porous and more hierarchical world than the present one — easier to enter from a small town, harder to rise in, and the kind of place where the line between a small part and a tree was a real working line. The present industry is more middle-class, more bureaucratised, and more legible to a mainstream press; it is also, by several accounts, harder for working actors to break into in the way that Bajpayee and Siddiqui did. The tree anecdote is, in part, a memorial to that older arrangement.

Stakes, and what the sources do not tell us

The factual substance of the Indian Express piece is thin: a recollection by one actor about a junior colleague, on an unnamed set, in a moment that the public record does not further specify. It is useful as a small datapoint about how the Hindi film industry's working culture is being remembered by the people who lived through it, and how that memory is being packaged for the present readership. It is not useful as a basis for claims about either actor's career, the production in question, or the broader industry.

The sources do not specify the name of the production on which Siddiqui played the tree. They do not specify when the events took place, beyond the obvious constraint that it predates Siddiqui's breakthrough in the mid-2000s. They do not specify the name of the director who attached the "panauti" label, and they do not specify whether the director in question is a public figure. The sources also do not specify how often the anecdote has been told previously, or whether the Indian Express piece represents a new statement by Bajpayee or a re-circulation of an earlier interview. The reporting here is, accordingly, conservative: it takes the anecdote at face value as a piece of set folklore, and declines to extrapolate from it.

What this publication would note is the way the anecdote has been packaged. The Indian Express piece leans into the soft, humanising register that the Indian English film press uses for established Hindi actors — the assumption of an inside audience, the gentle teasing, the willingness to be the butt of one's own joke. It is, in that narrow sense, an effective piece of cultural writing. The fact that it is still finding an audience in 2026, on a subject that was small enough to lose, is the small story underneath the small story.

This article takes a single Indian Express celebrity-profile line at face value and does not extrapolate beyond the source. The production on which Nawazuddin Siddiqui played a tree is not named in the source material, and this article does not attempt to identify it.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nawazuddin_Siddiqui
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manoj_Bajpayee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_of_Wasseypur