“We Are Upset With You, Rajpal Bhaiya”: The Story of 40 Gurukul Children, a Piggy Bank, and One Bollywood Actor’s Promise

When Children From a Shahjahanpur Gurukul Broke Their Savings to Support an Actor They Had Never Met, and When He Came Home Without Calling

There is a specific quality to the emotion a child feels when they give everything they have and hear nothing back — not anger, not bitterness, just the particular weight of a gesture that went out into the world and returned no echo. That is precisely what approximately 40 students at the Gurukul Seva Trust school in Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh were expressing when they recorded a short, quiet video that became one of this week’s most unexpectedly affecting stories in Indian entertainment news. They were not demanding. They were not performing disappointment for social media. They were children who had done something genuinely kind and genuinely costly — for them — and who wanted to know, simply, if the person they had done it for had noticed.

The Background: Why Rajpal Yadav Was in Jail

To understand why 40 children in Shahjahanpur broke open their piggy bank, you need to understand the case that put one of Hindi cinema’s most beloved comic actors behind bars in February 2026.

Rajpal Yadav — the National School of Drama graduate and Bollywood character actor whose face is inseparable from a generation of Hindi comedies including Mujhse Shaadi Karogi, Phir Hera Pheri, Bhool Bhulaiyaa, Hungama, Chup Chup Ke, Waqt, and Partner — surrendered at Tihar Jail on February 5, 2026 after the Delhi High Court rejected his last-minute plea for more time to clear a longstanding financial debt. The case traced directly back to a single creative decision made 16 years earlier: his directorial debut.

In 2010, Yadav borrowed ₹5 crore from M/s Murali Projects Private Limited — a company based in Delhi’s Laxmi Nagar — to fund his directorial debut film Ata Pata Laapata. The film released and failed at the box office. The loan remained unpaid. Over the intervening 16 years, interest, penalties, and delayed payment charges caused the principal ₹5 crore to balloon to nearly ₹9 crore. In an attempt to settle the dues, Yadav issued seven cheques to the lender across the repayment period — all seven were dishonoured, triggering criminal proceedings under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act (the provision that criminalises cheque bouncing in India). The Delhi courts found him guilty in all seven cases, requiring him to pay ₹1.35 crore in each case — a combined outstanding liability of nearly ₹9 crore.

Through the legal process, Yadav made partial payments, offered repeated assurances, and submitted fresh payment schedules — approximately 20 separate undertakings in total, by the court’s own count. Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma of the Delhi High Court, who ultimately delivered the final surrender order on February 2, 2026, was unsparing in her characterisation of this pattern: the court had shown “scant respect” for its own orders by continuing to extend leniency in the face of systematic non-compliance. When Yadav’s counsel appeared on February 4 with a fresh ₹25 lakh demand draft and yet another proposed payment schedule, Justice Sharma declined — noting that compassion must be balanced with discipline and that the judiciary could not create “special circumstances” for members of the film industry. On the afternoon of February 5, 2026, Rajpal Yadav surrendered to the Tihar Jail authorities to begin a six-month sentence.

He served 12 days before being granted interim bail on February 16, 2026 — the release was confirmed a day after bail was granted, delayed by verification and paperwork procedures.

The Piggy Bank: What 40 Children Did While He Was Inside

Students in yellow uniforms writing at desks in classroom with male teacher 

It was during those 12 days between Yadav’s surrender and his bail that the students of Gurukul Seva Trust school in Shahjahanpur — the same Shahjahanpur district in Uttar Pradesh from which Rajpal Yadav himself hails — made a decision that required no one to ask them and benefited no one except the man it was intended for.

Kumar Sagar, the chairman of the Gurukul Seva Trust, described the sequence of events to PTI: approximately 40 students pooled money saved from their daily pocket expenses into a piggy bank, added some additional amount, and on February 21, 2026 sent the piggy bank by post to Yadav’s ancestral village address in Kundra. They also enclosed a handwritten letter, expressing their admiration for the actor who came from their home district and their wish to meet him after his release. The contribution was entirely voluntary, drawn from the money children receive for their own small daily expenses — the kind of money that buys a single snack or a small stationery item. They chose to send it instead to a man they had never met, because he was from Shahjahanpur and he was in trouble.

The gesture carries the specific quality of uncalculated generosity that only children consistently manage — there was no social media angle in the original act, no thought of recognition, no calculation of return. It was simply: he is from here, he needs help, we have this, we will send it.

The Video: “We Are Upset With You, Rajpal Bhaiya”

When Yadav was released on interim bail on February 16 and the days after his release passed without a response to their letter, without a call, without any acknowledgement, the children made a 29-second video that captured what they were feeling with the directness that children bring to emotional honesty.

In the video — which subsequently went viral across entertainment news and social media — the students addressed the actor directly in the form of a namaskar: “Namaste Rajpal bhaiya, we have learnt that you have returned home after being released from jail. Congratulations to you. We all want to meet you and know whether you received the help we sent. If you did, why did you not respond to our letter? We are upset with you.”

The video’s closing line delivered the final measure of the children’s generosity of spirit even in their disappointment: they said that if he could not meet them in person, he could at least have called to speak to them and reassure them. The implicit logic of that closing request — that even a phone call would have been sufficient, that the expectation was so modest it barely qualified as one — is the detail that cuts deepest in this story.

Rajpal Yadav’s Response: “I Will Hug Them”

The viral video reached Yadav, and he responded to PTI by telephone shortly after it circulated. His explanation for the delay was the specific explanation that the circumstances supported: he had only just returned home, had not yet had the proper opportunity to sit with his own family after 12 days in Tihar, and was in the process of gathering details about everyone who had extended help to him during his imprisonment.

The response also contained a small initial confusion that he immediately corrected. When first told about the children, he said: “I was told they were from an orphanage. In my view, if children have an ashram, they are not orphans.” When informed that they were students at a gurukul school — not an orphanage — Yadav’s register shifted entirely: “I am a person who believes in the guru tradition, and all those children are my own. I will definitely meet them, hug them and take photographs with them.”

The phrase “all those children are my own” is not a throwaway formality in the cultural context of a man from Shahjahanpur who has publicly stated his belief in the guru-shishya tradition — it is the specific claim of a connection that he has acknowledged and is committed to honouring. Whether the meeting takes place, and when, is the chapter of this story that remains to be written.

The Larger Story: Who Rajpal Yadav Is

It is worth pausing to understand why 40 Shahjahanpur gurukul students reached for their piggy bank when a Bollywood actor went to jail — because the answer reveals something about Yadav’s specific place in the culture.

Rajpal Yadav is not a Bollywood star in the glamour-and-press-conference sense. He is a National School of Drama (NSD) trained actor who built a career in the most demanding way available to a man from a small UP district: through craft, versatility, and the willingness to play the role rather than perform the personality. His comedic roles — the panicked sidekick, the incompetent villain’s henchman, the man whose face alone communicates an entire paragraph of comic subtext — made him one of the most recognized character actors in Hindi cinema of the 2000s and 2010s. He is from Shahjahanpur. He is one of their own in the most direct geographical sense. And the children of the Gurukul Seva Trust understood that one of their own was in trouble, and they responded with the tools available to them.

The financial case against him — a ₹5 crore loan from 2010 that grew to ₹9 crore across 16 years of non-repayment and dishonoured cheques — is the legal record. His brother Sripal has maintained that Rajpal invested money in the film rather than borrowing it, and that the signatures on the relevant documents reflected an investment agreement that the company subsequently characterised as a loan after the film failed. The court’s view, delivered across 20 successive payment undertakings, is the other record. Both records exist simultaneously, and neither changes what 40 children in a UP gurukul did when they heard that Rajpal Yadav was in Tihar.

Why This Story Matters

In a week when Indian entertainment news moved between reality show controversies, award season results, and the usual churn of celebrity gossip, the story of a viral 29-second video made by children in a Shahjahanpur gurukul cut through with the specific force of the genuinely unscripted. No publicist planned it. No brand activated it. No social media strategy produced it. Forty children pooled their pocket money, wrote a letter, mailed a piggy bank to a village address in Uttar Pradesh, waited for a response that did not arrive, and then made a short video that asked, with complete directness: did you receive it, and if you did, why haven’t you replied?

The answer — I will meet them, I will hug them, all those children are my own — is the promise that now exists in the public record, made by a man who has had occasion in recent weeks to reflect on what obligations and relationships mean, to a group of children whose act of generosity required no public record to be genuine. The meeting, when it happens, will be smaller than the story it completes. It will also be more real.

Rajpal Yadav went to jail over a chain of events that began with a single creative decision in 2010 and ended — 16 years later — with a Delhi High Court order that had run out of patience.

The Original Loan: A Film That Failed

In 2010, Yadav borrowed ₹5 crore from a Delhi-based company, M/s Murali Projects Private Limited, to finance his directorial debut Ata Pata Laapata — a Hindi comedy he both directed and produced. The film released and performed poorly at the box office, leaving him without the returns needed to repay the debt. By August 2012, when a formal repayment agreement was drawn up, the total liability including principal and accrued interest had already grown to approximately ₹11.10 crore. Yadav gave an undertaking before the High Court to repay ₹7 crore, and the legal battle entered a cycle it would not exit for over a decade. The businessman who lent the money — Madhav Gopal Agrawal of Murali Projects — later clarified publicly that the transaction was a loan, not an investment, directly contradicting Yadav’s brother Sripal’s claim that the money had been invested in the film rather than borrowed.

The Cheque Bounces: How a Civil Dispute Became Criminal

To settle the outstanding dues across the years that followed, Yadav issued seven cheques to M/s Murali Projects. All seven were dishonoured — they bounced. Under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, a dishonoured cheque issued in settlement of a legally enforceable debt is a criminal offence in India, carrying a maximum sentence of two years’ imprisonment or a fine of twice the cheque amount, or both. Each of the seven dishonoured cheques constituted a separate criminal case — seven cases in total.

The Delhi sessions court convicted Yadav in May 2024 and sentenced him to six months in jail across the seven cases. The High Court suspended the sentence in June 2024 specifically to give the parties time to reach a settlement. In each of the seven cases, Yadav was required to pay ₹1.35 crore — a combined liability running to nearly ₹9 crore. In October 2025, two demand drafts totalling ₹75 lakh were deposited — leaving approximately ₹9 crore still unpaid.

Twenty Undertakings: The Court’s Patience Runs Out

The Delhi High Court’s February 2026 orders contain the most damning element of the entire case — not the money, but the pattern. The court recorded that Yadav had given approximately 20 separate undertakings across the proceeding years, each promising to pay specific amounts by specific dates — and had systematically failed to honour them. Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma’s order on February 2, 2026 directed him to surrender by 4 PM on February 4. He missed that deadline — his counsel told the court he had reached Delhi late — and on February 4 his senior counsel appeared with a fresh offer: a demand draft of ₹25 lakh and yet another proposed repayment schedule. Justice Sharma declined, stating that no further hearing would be granted unless Yadav first surrendered to jail. The court noted that his conduct “deserved to be deprecated” and that extending further leniency would send the wrong message — specifically noting that the judiciary could not create special circumstances for film industry members.

On February 5, 2026, Rajpal Yadav surrendered to Tihar Jail authorities.

Release on Bail: 12 Days Later

He served 12 days before the Delhi High Court granted interim bail on February 15, 2026. He was released on February 16 after paperwork and verification procedures were completed, with the bail lasting until March 18, 2026. On release, he said he was grateful for the support he had received during his imprisonment — from the Bollywood fraternity, from fans, and from the children of a Shahjahanpur gurukul who had sent him their pocket savings. He resumed shooting for the film Welcome to the Jungle within days of his release.

The Case in Summary

The root cause was not simply a failure to repay a loan — it was the specific legal consequence of issuing cheques that bounced, which converted a civil financial dispute into a criminal matter, and the court’s conclusion that 16 years and 20 broken undertakings had exhausted any claim to further judicial leniency.