There is very little that is filmy about Anil Sharma. You cannot make out that he is the same guy who literally created Gadar at the box office at the turn of millennium. He comes across as a long lost cousin from your neighbourhood whom you miss in the rush of metropolis, the guy who is more at ease with the puris, the halwas and of course the peras of his home town Mathura but doesn’t mind adapting to the ‘forked’ environs of a five star. It is tea time and we are at the bustling coffee shop of Le Meridien.
Sharma opts for Jasmine tea and as always I failed to think beyond watermelon juice. My limitation seems similar to Sharma’s whose imagination seems to stop at themes laden with action. Veer , his last outing at the turnstiles, may have failed to evoke desired interest, but it hasn’t deterred Sharma from announcing his next action fiesta. Called Singh Sahab The Great , he is reuniting with Sunny Deol with whom he has an enviable record.
“With action back in demand I have been flooded with requests on social media to do something with Sunny. When it comes to pure action, he is still the best guy around.” Agreed, but these days action works when it is mixed with humour of different hues. “Sunny has done it in the past,” Sharma counters. “In Gadar, he showed his lighter side in the first half and has done films like Jo Bole So Nihaal . Here he is playing a Sikh collector posted in the Uttar Pradesh-Bihar border area. When the two cultures clash, humour emerges as a by-product!”
Is it something that he has learnt from the downfall of Veer , where Salman Khan allegedly criticised him for not incorporating enough humour? “See, I respect him and feel if there is a successor to Dharmendra it is him. That’s why I worked with him but when you are telling the story of a ‘veer’, you can’t lighten the storyline beyond a point. We had differences and I said that had it been called Veer—The maskhara, I would have filled the script with gags. It was Salman’s story so he felt a lot more associated. Any way, it was a big budget film and still recovered its cost. So there were no hard feelings.”
With Sunny it could be the other way round. Sharma agrees but promises that Sunny is game to mould himself. “Saranjeet Singh doesn’t mind small time corruption but when it becomes a matter of life and death he takes a stand. Like he is dead against contaminating food and milk to make profits.”
Pollution reminds him of the freshness in Delhi’s vegetables, which he misses in Mumbai. For now he is in a mood to slice off vegetarian pizza at the coffee shop. Grandson of renowned astrologer Dal Chand Sharma, Sharma has got vegetarianism in his roots. “I grew up in the Holi Gate area of Mathura where even onion and garlic are seen in bad light. To me entering into the kitchen was an opportunity to help my grandmother. She would ask me to mould the flour, turn the puri in the kadhai, boil the milk…perhaps she wanted to familiarise me with the jobs women do without making a fuss. My grandfather taught me many folk tales and then he would ask me to narrate tales of Nachiketa, Dhruv and Savitri in an evocative fashion. Later it helped me in narrating stories to actors and producers.” It is this skill that helped him in convincing Rakhee for his first film, Shradhanjali , when he was just 21. “She was popular as female Raj Kumar because of her tantrums but with me she was very amiable. She is a very good cook and used to prepare delicacies for the entire unit.”
For Sharma food has also proved to be a sign of praise and fostering new bonds. “When people in Punjab showed unprecedented response to Gadar , distributors and theatre owners ensured that village folk, who travelled long distances in carts to watch the film, could cook outside theatres and increased seating capacity and number of shows. The screening used to begin at 6.30 in the morning. After the release I went on a world tour with my family and believe me for those two months I didn’t have to pay for the dinner. Cynics say that the film was anti-Pakistan but I visited many Pakistani restaurants during that period and everybody welcomed us. Similarly during the shooting of Hero , we were shooting in freezing conditions at the highest railway station in Switzerland when a local restaurant came up with a vegetarian dish which had lots of vegetables and cheese. It was a distant cousin of pizza. Sunny named it indisa. I have heard it is still served there.”
As the cutlery is laid to rest here, one can’t resist asking Sharma if we could hope to see a bit of variety, like a pure love story? “You won’t believe in my free time I don’t like to see action films. I would any day prefer My Fair Lady over Godfather ,” he surprises me with his response. “It is an image that has stuck to me since Hukumut . Those were the days when gentry had stopped going to theatres. I had to make something that would appeal to the masses to survive,” he explains. Hukumat was a huge success. “I made three more films with more or less the same story: Elan-e-Jung , Farishtey and Tehelka . All three were super hits. After that I took a break and decided to change my image but nobody was ready to back or work in a love story with me. I produced a couple of films but they didn’t work. It is not that my action films don’t have a romantic track but it is never noticed. A popular actor once said to me: If I have to do a love story I will go to Yash Chopra. Apke saath to action hi karna hai . But I have not given up.” Sweet and honest!
