CID marks 20th anniversary: Hers’s why ACP Pradyuman, Daya, Abhijeet, Freddy, Pankaj, Salunkhe and Purvisay they are a family in real life too

It is around 3 pm on a Friday and Dayanand Shetty is done for the day. He places his brown bag in the backseat of his white Mini Cooper, shuts the door, and simply hangs out at the parking lot, drinking tea from a plain stainless steel glass as he chats with Narendra Gupta and the crew members from the various teams. 

"Silence!"

The director's voice echoes and everyone stops what they are doing. Cameras begin rolling as Abhijeet, Purvi, Pankaj and Freddy conduct their murder investigation amidst broken mannequins at a faux fashion designer's studio in a room adjacent to the parking lot. Tense moments pass, then we hear 'Cut!' and the chatter resumes. A few moments later, the call for silence rings in the air again.

This goes on for almost an hour but Shetty continues to chill with the crew. Once the scene is finally canned, he gets into his car and starts the engine. The roar from the powerful machine tells you why he waited this long to get going. He didn't want to disturb the shoot.

And that's the kind of behaviour you'll see from every member of the cast and crew on the sets of CID, India's longest-running police procedural, which completes 20 years this weekend. 

The show has created a milestone in Indian television and its stars Dayanand Shetty (Daya), Shivaji Satam (ACP Pradyuman), Aditya Srivastava (Abhijeet) and Dinesh Phadnis (Freddy) are household names. Yet, no one has any starry airs on set. They greet the crew members they pass by when they first enter the set at the start of the day - some with handshakes, some with hugs - ask each other if they have had lunch, praise the cook for the tasty food, and pose for photos with fans at their request. 

The younger actors Ajay Nagrath (Pankaj) and Ansha Sayed (Purvi) who joined the show just a few years ago too follow their example.

"We are like a family," is the refrain you hear from all the actors and while it may seem corny at first, it rings true in this case. 

As the other cast members exit the room and enter the parking lot, they notice that Shetty is on his way out. One yells and waves goodbye, another walks up to his car and has a quick word through the window. It is another five minutes before he finally backs out of the gate.

"We have a lot of fun together on sets," says Satam. "It's the kind of fun that is good and doesn't hurt anyone. We know each other's likes and dislikes. We take care of each other consciously and sub consciously, and avoid behaviour we know will hurt someone else."

The senior cast members also make it a point to make any new cast member or guest star feel welcome on the sets.

"It makes me very happy when people come and tell us that they like the Pankaj-Freddy jodi," says Nagrath. "But majority of the credit goes to him (Fadnis). He has been on the show way longer than I have and for us to create that comfort level, that bonding, is because of him. It has made my job easier."

The bonding goes beyond just the men. Shraddha Musale (Dr Tarika) and Sayed are the only two women who are part of the show's regular cast. But as Sayed points out, "I have never felt out of place because I am a girl."

Satam states that cast members who have left the show, or those who guest star on the show, often comment on this bonhomie and say they have not found this kind of working environment on any other show. 

As Gupta, who plays Dr Salunkhe recalls, when he "took a leave" from the show for a few years and then returned, he found nothing different in the way things had been and were. It was as if he had never left.

Of course there is tension, there is disagreement while shooting. Srivastava may not like the line of dialogue with which a scene begins or a scene simply does not flow for Satam and he gets irritated. Gupta may remind a young crew member loudly that he knows what he is doing. Sayed flubs a line of dialogue three times in a row, because of which Srivastava and Phadnis have to do retakes. 

But none of these things result in any kind of bad blood. If the cameraman is unable to explain to Sayed where she needs to look for a shot, Srivastava steps in and explains it to her patiently. If Satam or Sayed have any doubts about the scene since they don't shoot them in order, they talk it out with the writer and director.

If there are any last-minute changes in dialogue due to unavailablity of a cast member, the others simply shrug and work around it. When Sayed worries that she will hurt Ajay when she hits him for a scene, he is the one who tells her repeatedly not to bother about it. 

"Our differences are like having different sizes of fingers, they are not all the same," says Shetty as he shows his open palm. "But we all have to stay together." he adds, closing his palm into a fist. "There are compromises with each other's thoughts, type of acting as everyone has their own way and that's fine. It has been 20 years and we are like a family now."