When Danish Sait was all of 13, he attended a VJ hunt on MTV, and was kindly told by Vaibhav Vishal, the channel’s creative head at the time, to invest in his studies. A few years later, Sait turned up at an SS Music VJ hunt sporting a head of blue hair, and made some progress. Although he does not have pictures of his look from the time, as he owned a Nokia 6600 and documentation of personal style was obviously less of a fad then, he was clearly making an impression even at a young age. Now, just a few weeks ago, the very same Vishal tweeted the teaser of Sait’s upcoming film, Humble Politician Nograj, with a congratulatory message.
Making a mark
Nograj is something of a pop-culture phenomenon today. A parody of the modern-day politician, he periodically appears on YouTube and Facebook Live, wearing his trademark sunglasses and thick moustache, spewing politically incorrect statements without a care in the world. But before he adopted the guise of Nograj on radio — and Asgar, and Chacko, among countless others — Sait’s voice had already been on the airwaves in Bahrain and Dubai.
“It’s okay to lie sometimes,” he says with a deadpan expression, over breakfast on a quiet, tree-lined street in Bengaluru’s Richards Town. “As long as you’re not harming anyone.” He landed his first job at a radio station in Bahrain saying he had prior experience, before proceeding to make a hash out of a 25-minute link he was asked to do, and learning an important lesson in the process. “In any profession, if you don’t learn it, you don’t earn it. So I started learning it.”
Creativity calls
Sait continued to work in Bahrain for a while, before moving to Dubai, a stint he describes as a “failure”, and finally heading to Bengaluru to Fever FM. That was the time he was grappling with depression and spinning his wheels until he was given an ultimatum: come up with something creative or leave.
“If I had been told the same thing six months before, it would have broken me as a person. But it coincided with my recovery. I was feeling better and my mind was fresh,” he says, with a seriousness that is difficult to associate with Nograj.
It was then that he came up with the idea of calling people up and pranking them, adopting different voices. A prank call he had made in Bahrain had found its way on to the tapes he had sent for his subsequent jobs, and one of the hosts at the station asked him to try it again. Sait asked for seven minutes, was give 90 seconds, and soon Bengaluru was left in splits by Nograj terrorising a hapless youngster pretending to be his girlfriend's father.
I ask Sait how many of the people he has pranked has he met in real life, and he pauses a moment before replying, “Three or four.” And what were these interactions like? “Very awkward,” he says sheepishly, as he recalls an incident when he pranked an employee of a company at an event he was hosting for them, and later ran into the person at Goa airport. “He called me a few names, but later gave me a hug and told me he just needed to vent.”
It was as his prank calls were gaining momentum that Sait met Saad Khan of The Improv comedy group. He wasted no time in attending a tryout and joining them on stage for their next act. Khan, who has been a friend to Sait and hapless bystander to Nograj’s antics, is the director of the politician’s silver screen outing. “Improv is not just a comedy skill, it’s a life skill,” Sait explains, adding, “I think everything in my life has been improv. Life is improv.”
Funny face forward
Despite having an excellent roster of characters, why did he choose to become Nograj when he made the switch to YouTube (after realising that SoundCloud, where he posted his clips, was no longer sufficient)? “I actually tried Asgar on Facebook Live once, but because he had a beard, the first five comments said ‘Terrorist’. The narrow-mindedness was disgusting. But in the last five years or so, politics has become a part of the Internet and vice-versa, and people are calling politicians out on their bluffs, and politicians, in turn, have become immune to it. So having a guy like Nograj, who’s celebrating Mia Khalifa’s birthday (‘She’s given me my best memories!’) or pushing for the steel flyover in Bengaluru despite public disapproval, is being seen for the satire it is. People are playing along. When I say I’m going to distribute alcohol for votes, there are people in the comments saying ‘ Namaskaara sir, one bottle of Old Monk for me’.”
As we briefly discuss the online landscape, and the vitriol performers face on the Internet, Sait chooses to bring up instances of genuine affection he has received from fans in real life. “How can one bad word on the Internet compensate for that? I genuinely believe we spend way too much time outraging over things that are petty in the larger scheme of things, and the day the people of this nation come together, there is no power that can shake us.”
He does, however, admit that this is something Nograj would never wish for. “He likes it divided! He’d divide you based on anything.”
The upcoming film will present a more complete picture of the character, and bring to life supporting characters he mentions in his calls, like Manjunath and his wife Lavanya. However, Sait says he and Khan have consciously tried not to reference Nograj’s previous capers. “While I can be cerebral and crack meta jokes with friends and family, with the audience I like to keep things simple. I don’t know what it will bring to the table in terms of money and appreciation, but we wanted to make a good film, period”
Does he plan to do more films? “It was a childhood dream and I have achieved it, so I don’t know.” More improv, then? “That’s what I’ve done all my life, so probably yes, more improv.”
Humble Politican Nograj is slated to hit screens around September, or as Nograj would say, ‘caming soon’.
