Q:  What aroused your interest in acting?

            A:  At the risk of sounding corny, I’d say acting to me is sort of like breathing.  It isn’t something I ever actively thought about doing or not doing; it just happened on its own. The first time I went on stage was when I was four, and after that it has been one performance after another.

            Q:  Since you’ve worked with both the Family Front and the 2Good teams, which brand of humour do you find more to your liking?

            A: Are you trying to start a feud? However, since you insist on an answer I’d say the 2Good  humour was more to my liking. The humour in Family Front isn’t really character-based; it’s more play-on-the-words kind of humour which is not something I enjoy. If you take a look at its script, the characters are hardly distinguishable from one another since they all basically have the same sort of lines.

            The secret of Family Front’s  success lies in its brilliant cast and able direction which manages to give the show its punch. The humour in 2Good  was character-based.  Sherry was the wannabe angrez, Abdul was the sarak-chaap  loafer;  Dinky was the snobbish queen of cool, while Annie was the no-holds-barred nutcase!   

            Q:  Why didn’t 2Good  provoke the kind of response that Teen Butta Teen did?

            A:  There are two main reasons for this.  Firstly, when Teen Butta Teen  began, it was something completely fresh.  People hadn’t really seen anything quite like it on PTV before, so obviously there was a lot of curiosity which got it a large viewing audience. But Teen Butta Teen  ended up polarising the audience: people either loved it or hated it. A similar show from the same team was bound to not seem as fresh or new, which is why it suffered by comparison.  Also, people got confused; they expected Johnny, Loosy and Shaffoo all over again, and when they didn’t get them, they switched off!

            Q:  One hears that you are about to start shooting a murder mystery that you have written. From sitcoms to suspense thrillers, it’s quite a leap...

            A:  Well, I have a lot of varied interests. Even in cinema, I enjoy films from different genres.  Where I love the zany comedy of the Marx Brothers, I’m also crazy about Hitchcock; I love to watch the melodrama of Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls, but I also enjoy the grittiness of Scorcese and Kubrick, and the surrealism of Alain Resnais and Maya Deren too. So I guess it’s only natural that in my own work too I cross the boundaries of genres without thinking it strange or out of the ordinary. And besides, I’ve only been acting in comedies, I haven’t written them.

            Q:  Have you had any unpleasant experiences with the censor board?

            A:  If the censor board is hell-bent on making your life miserable for no reason, it can get quite unpleasant. I think it exists just to give people a hard time, and yes, I think they do have a personal agenda.  It very rarely has anything to do with something that is actually objectionable. Otherwise, why would they object to us showing three girls standing innocently on their balcony, while they had no objections to a certain model-actress frolicking on a beach in a slit-skirt in a play produced by someone rather ‘influential’? Once they told us to cut 17 minutes out of a 25-minute episode of TBT because they felt the depiction of the mehndi was ‘too long’. Well, it’s not their job to decide that, is it now? They’re just supposed to look out for ‘objectionable’ stuff. And that’s the basic problem; because their job is ill-defined, and because there is no written censor policy outlining what you can or cannot show, they can pick on anything and everything and get away with it; one is helpless.

            Q:  Your Bachelors from Concordia University was in film production but so far you’ve steered clear of the studios.  Is films something you hope to eventually turn to? What kind of films do you see yourself making?

            A:  It sounds like a cliché, but I’ll have to unlearn a lot of the things I learnt at university if I’m to work in films here. I’m not averse to making films, but I don’t think I’m ready for it yet.You have to learn to deal with the kinds of people you encounter in the filmworld.  You can’t go blustering in like Cecil B. De Mille and expect everyone to fall at your feet just because you’ve got a degree. I have to have some sort of standing before I plunge in. As for the kinds of films I would make, I’ve grown up watching Hindi films so I’m not against doing something like that, but it would have to be done intelligently, with a solid script. Of course, the subject would have to be something I’m interested in – maybe something along the lines of what Guru Dutt or Hrishikesh Mukherjee did.

            Q:  You’ve done both theatre and TV plays.  Which do you enjoy more?

            A:  Theatre gets my vote, which is ironic because basically I’m a very shy, introverted person.  But, somehow, I find it exhilarating to act on stage. Maybe because it’s a more intimate medium, and you’re relating directly to the audience, and they’re responding to your work right there and then.

            Also, there is a sense of immense hard work and involvement with theatre – you’re toiling for months, rehearsing and putting it all together.  And then, there is a sense of a certain kind of ‘danger’ – if you mess up, you can’t go back and put it right.  Every performance is like doing it anew. In television, you don’t have this sort of excitement.  If you mess up a take, you can go back and do it again. 

            Q:  What is the secret of Such Gup’s  perennial appeal?

            A:  We still get offers to do it all the time because it is still so fresh, and above all, relevant. It’s not plain slapstick or juggatbaazi; it’s sharp, intelligent humour, is topical and dares to poke fun at many a sacred cow. Most of these skits were written more than twenty years ago but they’re still applicable to our society today. Yes, I think it’s ageless, but more significantly, I think these skits serve to remind us that we’ve lost something very precious – the ability to laugh at ourselves. We take ourselves too seriously. I guess it’s because, as a nation, we are full of insecurities and complexes.

            Q:  What is your opinion about the quality of humour in our commercial theatre?

            A:  I don’t think it’s something we have to lose sleep over. It’s a transitional phase which will peter out when its time is up. I think political and social changes are responsible for it to quite an extent so we can’t just point fingers at the people who are doing it. I do think however, that the Arts Council should be reprimanded for the role it plays. When we take a proper script to them which we want to perform on their stage, they give us nosebleeds over censorship and objectionable material, but somehow they find nothing objectionable in the kachra  being played under the guise of ‘theatre’ on their premises.

            Q:  Your  favourite  comedian?

            A:  Chaplin is one of my all-time favourites. Generally people think of him as just the comic character of the Tramp, but he was a remarkable filmmaker and story-teller as well. He was the only person who stood fast against the onslaught of sound films because he believed that he could best tell his tales in silence, and he did so successfully. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is remarkably brilliant parody – it was one of the only films at the time which dared to speak out against Hitler and fascism in such an uncompromising manner.

            Q:  Which comic productions have you particularly enjoyed?

            A:  On television, I used to enjoy Fifty-Fifty  a lot. In fact, I still watch it on video sometimes and also classics like I Love Lucy, and more recently, Seinfeld. In western cinema, my favourites include Chaplin of course, and films by the Marx Brothers which are just out of this world; in fact, if anyone wants to know what my kind of humour really is, they should just rent a Marx Brothers film. I also liked the film teamings of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. In Indian cinema, I love the Hrishikesh Mukherjee comedies with Amol Palekar, and especially Utpal Dutt who is probably my all-time favourite actor in Indian cinema. And also the Manorama character from films like Seeta aur Geeta  – especially, the heavy eye-liner and the menacing expressions