The actor joined the Divyaj Foundation's post-Visarjan clean-up drive at Juhu, calling it a shared responsibility rather than a photo opportunity.
Ajay Devgn spent Friday morning with a garbage bag in hand, not a script.
The actor turned up at Juhu Beach to join Amruta Fadnavis, wife of Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, for Sea Shore Shine 2026, a clean-up drive organised by her Divyaj Foundation. Videos circulating from the event show Devgn wading through debris left behind after Ganpati Visarjan, picking up waste and handing it off to volunteers filling bags along the shoreline.
This is being billed as Mumbai's biggest such drive since the immersions wrapped up, and the timing checks out. Every year, the days after Visarjan turn the city's beaches into a mess of flowers, plaster and plastic, and every year somebody with a camera crew shows up to remind people about it. Akshay Kumar did the same thing at Juhu last year.
What Devgn actually said at the event reads less like a soundbite and more like an appeal. "Just as we all love our homes and keep them clean, I think we also love our country, our city and our seas," he said, pointing out that the same instinct that keeps a house tidy ought to extend to public spaces. "So, don't you think it is our responsibility?"
He didn't stop there. "Unless we decide that we want to keep our city and our country clean, nothing will change," he added, before making the pitch collective. "If every person makes a small effort, then together we can keep everything clean very easily." He closed with a line that sounded almost like a dare: "Our future depends on you all."
Devgn also called the drive a "creative initiative," which is an odd word for hauling trash bags, but it fits the framing the Divyaj Foundation is going for, treating civic clean-up as something people opt into rather than something the BMC just handles quietly in the background.
Whether star power actually shifts behaviour on Mumbai's beaches is a separate question, and one that gets asked every single year without much of an answer. For now, the videos are out, the message is out, and the beach presumably looks better than it did on Thursday.
Off the sand, Devgn's calendar is full. He's currently working on Drishyam: The Conclusion, which brings back Tabu and adds Jaideep Ahlawat, Shriya Saran, Rajat Kapoor, Prakash Raj and Mrunal Jadhav to the cast. No release date has been mentioned alongside this appearance, so that update, like the state of Juhu Beach next September, will have to wait.
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