Bumbada in Bengal, Prosenjit in Mumbai. Whatever your preferred name, the actor made a dash to Mumbai, where his publicist had lined up back-to-back interviews from the evening he landed to the moment he returned to the airport.

“I’m time strapped,” he explained. “I have a hectic schedule when I return to Calcutta. Pujo is a major festival for us.”

An auspicious time for the Hindi cinema audience to get an intro to the man who’s suddenly straddling both cities.

It began with playing studio head Shrikant Roy in the Amazon show Jubilee (2023), a role somewhat patterned on Himanshu Rai and his tumultuous relationship with wife and business partner Devika Rai. With it, Bumbada was back in the Hindi film world, where earlier attempts like David Dhawan’s Aandhiyaan (1990), which was to have been Mumtaz’s comeback film, and Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai (2012) hadn’t worked.

Jubilee was the “Open Sesame” but Prosenjit had not grabbed it at first sight. It meant stepping into OTT for the first time. A big move for an established big screen actor, a household name who was accepted in all forms of Bengali cinema, action, mainstream, Shesh Pata.

“It took me two days to decide,” he said to me. Once he was all in, Jubilee was followed by seasoned politician Barunda in Khakee: The Bengal Chapter and then by police officer Prabhu Das in Buma. There is another Hindi film in which he’s the lead.

Prosenjit’s one-on-one interaction with the Mumbai media worked well as people here got to meet the energetic, well-preserved 62-year-old, the Anil Kapoor of Bengal. Like Anil, who moved from the youthful Ek do teen and Ay jee o jee to playing Ranbir Kapoor’s father in Animal, Prosenjit has aged with grace.

But maintaining oneself goes beyond Anil’s 12,000 step routine and his watch-the-calories diet of many years or Prosenjit’s “I believe we must take care of how we look”. There is a connection with happiness too. Anil is a content man, blessed with a wife and three kids who are all health-oriented.

Prosenjit may have led a more colourful life — his troubled childhood with father Biswajeet, his own failed marriages, his vanvas-like 14-year professional separation from Rituparna Sengupta and his outspoken admission that he was emotionally devastated after his break-up with Debashree Roy.

But Prosenjit today is a grudge-free man. Understanding his parents’ failed marriage after his own experiences, Biswajeet and he are a well-adjusted team, exchanging early morning WhatsApp messages, his son Trishanjit visiting his grandfather in Mumbai, and Prosenjit proudly talking of how Biswajeet’s 40-year Puja celebrations are still the best in the city.

Professionally too, Ajogyo marked his 50th film with Rituparna, a blockbuster patch-up.

The “How can I face the world?” wail that had made him a recluse after his marriage to Debashree withered is also an emotion he can joke about today. In fact, he’s all set to work with Debashree again.

Additionally, Prosenjit is in a good headspace because he also stays away from politics.

“Even the chief minister referred to me as Bumbada in her speech,” he told me. “I am close to her but I’ll never get involved with politics. Whether it’s a function in Calcutta or IFFI (organised by the Centre), I attend it.”

Keeping his nose out of politics includes avoiding an opinion on The Bengal Files. “I haven’t seen it,” he said.

Talking of politics, Anurag Kashyap’s new film Nishaanchi has a likeable cinematic swag and few would call his new hero Aaishvary Thackeray a nepo kid. But Anurag’s orgasmic praise for the hero who’s got a double role and an opening as a musician in Nishaanchi may be traced to Aaishvary being the grandson of Bal Thackeray and son of Smita Thackeray, once a formidable figure in the film industry. Whether in the chair or out of it, the surname still wields influence in Maharashtra.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and an author