MUMBAI: It was Salman Khan who had said that watching David Dhawan eating is more entertaining than watching David Dhawan’s films.

“The man just eats and eats and eats,” Salman was apparently heard quipping.

That pleasure will soon be a thing of the past. David Dhawan will finally lose those tell-tale pounds on his body, thereby ending his 20-year old  battle of the bulge.

The decision was taken this week after David fell and fractured his shoulder at a public function on Wednesday . The prolific director who is currently shooting a remake of Chashme Buddoor, underwent emergency surgery on Thursday afternoon at Leelavati.

The fall, it is felt by his doctors, would have been far less damaging if David had not piled on so much extra weight.

In a do-or-die endeavour to get David back into shape his family has decided to finally put the podgy director on a strict diet once he’s out of hospital. Says David’s son Rohit to businessofcinema.com, “We don’t know how exactly he tripped and fell. None of us was there with him. He had gone to attend his dear friends Shashi and Anu Ranjan’s awards function. The next thing we heard he was at Leelavati. We rushed there and was told it was a very painful fractured shoulder. Dad underwent operation on Thursday. He’s now recuperating, but in a lot of pain. He will have to undergo rigorous physiotherapy for a few months before his shoulder would be back to normal.”

Rohit says the accident was a  “good wakeup call”.“We’re definitely going to take charge of his diet now. Enough is enough. We don’t want a replay of the accident that happened .Dad agrees with us. So now we are on the same page.”