Written by Heena KhandelwalSeptember 12, 2025 07:28 PM IST 5 min readArjun Sen's life was captured on celluloid by Shoojit Sircar’s I Want To Talk (2024), starring Abhishek Bachchan.At 32, Arjun Sen had it all — an IIT degree, an MBA and a high-flying marketing career in the US. Then, one day, he coughed up blood. Doctors diagnosed him with laryngeal cancer. Despite surgery, it had spread to his colon and stomach, and he was given 100 days to live. Around the same time, his marriage ended, leaving him to co-parent his three-year-old daughter. Treatment meant he could no longer put in the 20-hour workdays he was known for and job loss soon followed.Anyone would break, and Sen did too. But with the help of his nurse and friend Nancy, he decided to rebuild his life. Using the skills he knew best — branding and marketing — he turned himself into a project, and on certain occasions, pitching surgeries/procedures that he found could help him get better to his doctors, as he underwent more than 20 surgeries.Also read | I Want to Talk movie review: Abhishek Bachchan’s performance is better than anything else he’s done so far, but Shoojit Sircar’s drama is too understatedThirty years later, Arjun Sen lives to tell the tale captured on celluloid by Shoojit Sircar’s I Want To Talk (2024), starring Abhishek Bachchan.Sen doesn’t even remember the number of surgeries. “While making the film, I counted and stopped at 21 or 22. I saw each surgery in isolation… because if you’d told me I had to go through 22, I would have given up,” he tells us on a rainy morning in Bandra last week. He was in India promoting his book Unquit Forever (Evincepub), released in November 2024 on the same day as the film.The film was almost accidental. “I don’t like talking about cancer with anyone beyond family, it scares me. And people respond with sympathy, which freaks me out more,” he says. For the first time, he opened up in 2020, at the insistence of his doctor. A common friend had connected him to Shoojit Sircar. The two first interacted on Sen’s podcast ‘Secrets to Win Big’ (August 2020). “It was supposed to be 30 minutes. We went on for nearly an hour. Shoojit shared deeply personal stories. That night, we spoke for hours and then again on Zoom. At some point, he became ‘Soojit’, and I became ‘Arjun da’.”About a year later, Sircar called, ‘Arjun da, this is the movie I want to make. There are lives that deserve movies like MS Dhoni’s and there are stories nobody thinks are worth telling. A regular person who doesn’t give up — that’s the real story,’ he said. It touched me,” says Sen.The film captures the evolution of his relationship with his daughter. At one point, she draws herself in the centre of a circle, with her father in the eighth orbit, in her bid to tell her how close she feels to the film. “The film starts after the divorce. With my daughter, we not only took her permission but also walked her through every scene to ensure she was comfortable,” he says. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Good Gobar Show (@goodgobarshow)While Arjun Sen gave all creative liberties to Shoojit Sircar when it came to his portrayal, he wrestled when the director established him as a ‘manipulator’ in the film. “I argued I’m more a ‘yes-extractor’, convincing my doctors to run tests I felt I needed,” he laughs. “But in the end, it’s his lens. Everyone is imperfect — and that’s okay.” When Abhishek Bachchan came on board, Sen was thrilled. “I’ve been a die-hard fan of his father.”Story continues below this adThe darkest moment in Sen’s story was when he picked March 4 as the day he would end his life, even sending gifts to loved ones. Nancy, who had received one of the gifts, sensed something was wrong. She kept calling. “On the seventh call, I accidentally picked up, then hung up. She called again, saying that nobody hangs up on me. When I told her it was over, she said calmly: ‘The headwind is strong. You can’t move forward. But if you have enough energy, take a U-turn, the headwind will become the tailwind, then there’s no stopping you.’ Even in that numb state, it hit me: life wasn’t over,” says Sen.Nancy’s response was a turning point. “Mental health is not one-and-done. One decision can ripple across two or three generations. I realised my life wasn’t just mine — I had shareholders: my daughter, my mother. I couldn’t be selfish,” says Sen.Today, Arjun Sen runs the marketing and branding firm ZenMango and the Unquit movement, taking his story to schools and colleges.“When you were learning to crawl as an infant, you fell countless times but didn’t quit. Quitting is learned later. Each of us is an ‘unquitter’. Even when life feels like it’s ending, we find a way through. For me, Unquit means returning to that fearless state. Earlier, I lived in a ‘me world’. Now I live in a ‘we world’, where my superpower is asking for help. Because we are all surrounded by Nancys.”Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.© The Indian Express Pvt LtdTags:Abhishek BachchanShoojit Sircar