'The Biggest Chapter of My Life Is Over': Shivaji Satam on B. P. Singh

By TaazaPulse News Desk · Published: 29 October 2026 · TaazaPulse Showbiz Desk

For twenty years, Indian television's most famous police officer took his orders from one man. This week, Shivaji Satam — ACP Pradyuman of CID — said goodbye to him. B. P. Singh, the creator of CID and one of the defining showrunners of Indian television, died on Tuesday at the age of 77 following a heart attack, and Satam's tribute to his mentor has led an outpouring of grief from the industry Singh helped build.

"The biggest chapter of my life is over today," Satam told Variety India. "He was a great man, a great friend. I learned everything from him." The actor's words, and his presence at Singh's funeral in Mumbai on Wednesday — where he garlanded his friend's remains — closed a partnership that began in 1998 and produced the longest-running crime series in Indian television history.

A partnership that defined an era

CID launched in 1998 and ran for two decades, an almost unthinkable lifespan in Indian television. Singh built it around a simple architecture: a core team, led by Satam's gravel-voiced ACP Pradyuman, investigating a new case each week with forensic theatre and catchphrases that entered everyday Indian speech. "Kuch toh gadbad hai" — "something is fishy" — became a national idiom; the slammed door of Daya, Pradyuman's ever-loyal inspector played by Dayanand Shetty, became a meme before memes had a name.

Singh also created Aahat, the horror anthology that ran in parallel and proved his range as a producer of genre television. But CID was the monument: hundreds of episodes, a generation of viewers who grew up with it across India and the diaspora — Pakistan included, where the show has long had an audience of its own — and a cast that stayed together with a loyalty the industry rarely sees.

The 111-minute episode

Among the stories retold this week, one captures the pair's working relationship best. Satam recalled an episode shot as a single continuous take of 111 minutes — a feat of choreography involving the whole cast and crew — undertaken only months after Singh had undergone cardiac surgeries. A producer protecting his health might have declined the experiment; Singh, Satam said, insisted on attempting the record. It stands as an apt summary of the man the tributes describe: a craftsman restless inside a formula he himself had created.

Satam also said, in remarks reported this week, that Singh deserved a Padma Shri — one of India's highest civilian honours — for his contribution to television, a call likely to be echoed as the industry reflects on a career largely spent outside the glamour economy of Bollywood while shaping the viewing habits of hundreds of millions.

The teacher behind the camera

The detail Satam returned to most warmly was pedagogical. He arrived on CID as a theatre actor, trained to project to the back row; Singh, who had begun his own career as a cameraman before becoming a director, taught him the opposite discipline — how to deliver for a lens inches away, how, in Satam's word, "magnification" works: the camera enlarges everything, so the performance must find the moments to be larger than life and the moments to disappear into stillness. "He explained magnification so well," Satam said. "He was a wonderful teacher."

Dayanand Shetty's tribute filled in the same portrait from the other side of the camera. Singh, Shetty said, was "like a godfather" to him — the man in front of whom he faced a camera for the first time — and one of the finest cameramen he ever worked with; Shetty noted Singh had been unwell for some time. Ashwini Kalsekar, who played Inspector Asha, grew emotional describing her "guru": "He taught me the basics — how to stand confidently in a frame, how to run when a scene demanded it, how to hold a pistol." Speaking to ANI at the funeral, Satam summed up the professional verdict: "A man like him, a technician of his calibre, is truly irreplaceable. Whatever I have learned from him is invaluable — and it wasn't just me. Every actor who had the privilege of working with him learned something from him."

Satam was equally frank that forty years of friendship had not been frictionless — "in friendships, there are misunderstandings and fights, but it never went beyond that. He was there in all seasons of my life" — a note of honesty that made the tribute read less like ceremony and more like testimony.

The farewell

Singh's death from a heart attack at 77 was announced by filmmaker Ashoke Pandit, and tributes followed from across the industry, including the Screenwriters Association and the Indian Film & Television Directors' Association. At Wednesday's funeral, the images were of the CID family itself: Satam garlanding his producer's remains, Dayanand Shetty among those who shouldered the bier, and Aditya Srivastava — Inspector Abhijeet — in attendance. The team that solved fictional cases together for twenty years performed its last duty together in real life.

Why CID endures

CID's afterlife has been as notable as its run. The series found a second audience in the streaming era, clips circulate endlessly, and a revival of the franchise in recent years confirmed that the characters retain their pull. Satam, well into his seventies, remains inseparable from Pradyuman in the public mind — a typecasting he has always worn as a badge of honour rather than a burden, crediting Singh for the role that defined him.

That is the note on which the tributes converge: in an industry structured around stars, B. P. Singh built a universe and then stood behind it, and the man who played its most famous character insists the universe was the achievement. "I learned everything from him," Satam said. Indian television, this week, is agreeing with him.

The man behind CID: cameraman, borrower, institution-builder

Singh's own route to CID was as improbable as the show's longevity. Born in Dehradun in 1949, he studied cinematography at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune and began work in 1973 as a news cameraman with Doordarshan, the state broadcaster — a grounding in real-world filming that colleagues say never left his crime stories. His early crime programme Ek Shunya Shunya led to the horror anthology Aahat in 1995, and then, in 1998, to CID.

The pilot nearly did not happen. In an earlier interview, Singh recalled a lean period after one of his Marathi serials ended, and how a bank — remembering that he had repaid a car loan on time — offered him a personal loan. He combined roughly ₹40 lakh of borrowed money with about ₹5 lakh of his own savings to finance the CID pilot, betting his credit on a format Indian television had never sustained. The idea itself, he said, came from a conversation with a forensic expert: he wanted a mystery drama built on evidence and scientific investigation rather than melodrama. He also stepped in front of his own camera from time to time, playing DCP Shamsher Singh Chitrole.

The industry beyond his studio recognised the craftsman too: Singh served as president of the Indian Film & Television Directors' Association and, in 2018, as president of the FTII Society and chairman of its governing council — the institution that had trained him, now asking him to lead it. It is that arc, from borrowed money to the top of his film school, that Satam's Padma Shri call rests on.

More entertainment coverage is on our Showbiz desk, including our report on Arshad Warsi's song shoot for King and the Jolly LLB 4 announcement. TaazaPulse's condolences go to B. P. Singh's family, colleagues and the millions of viewers his work entertained.