Vineet Kumar Singh in conversation with Subhash K Jha talks about his brilliant performance and experience filming for Anurag Kashyap’s Murabba in the anthology Bombay Talkies, which released 12, yes 12 years ago!
Bombay Talkies has completed twelve years. Your performance in the Omnibus is till talked about?
I am so happy. I did not even realize that twelve years have gone by. It was a very good experience in Bombay Talkies. The story in which I worked was Murabba. The character’s name was Vijay, and it was amazing. It was about the task given by the father of that character, played by Sudhir Pandeyji. ‘You go and feed the murabba to the superstar of the century, Amitabh Bachchan, sir, and then my health will be fine.’ That boy, my character Vijay, comes to Mumbai from Prayagraj to feed the jam to Amitabh Bachchan sir with his own hands.
Your character had a brilliant graph?
Yes, in that whole process, the way a character evolves in Mumbai, from coming to feeding the jam and back… In the journey between leaving and reaching his father back home, he understands life. He understands that he was living in some other world and perhaps this was his father’s intention that his son should evolve and understand life on his own. So, in the whole effort and struggle to feed Bachchan Saab, a murabba, he saw and lived so much of life that it would be useful to him throughout his life.
Did the story help you evolve?
That story was very useful to me as an actor. I had a lot of fun, and I consider myself fortunate because I was part of the film for the celebration and tribute to 100 years of Indian cinema. Bombay Talkies was made for this purpose, and four very good directors directed four stories – Karan Johar Sir, Zoya Akhtar, Diwakar Banerjee, and Anurag Kashyap, sir. I got to work with Anurag Sir. This character, Vijay, was something new for me, Sir. It was something that I am not in my personal life, and most of the scenes were improvised, meaning they were hardly written in four pages.
You shot most of the film outside Mr Bachchan’s bungalow?
It used to happen impromptu. The guards outside Bachchan sahab’s bungalow were also not informed and I was left alone to behave like a fan. A random talk would start, and then the guards would be told about the purpose of my visit. It seemed as if someone has actually come who insists on feeding Bachchan Sir jam, so that entire scene is the first take, so even the guards did not know that this was going to happen and it was planned, so that scene kept getting improvised and all the scenes that came after that also kept being improvised, talking to a random taxi driver, talking to a random stranger, asking him, so there are a lot of moments like this in that film.
So much improvisation must have helped you evolve as an actor.
It helped me a lot as an actor; now improvising feels like it makes the process of acting beautiful, that some things are planned and some things are unplanned. And when both are mixed, it becomes beautiful. So it was a very good experience, and that story is liked, and even now, people send its clips; some of its clips keep going viral every now and then, so I am so happy today. Twelve years have been completed and thank you so much sir thank you, thank you it is a big thing that you remembered me for this thing. It is a big thing for an artist to do some work and if the connoisseurs remember that character, then it is a happiness which lasts a lifetime. The money that we earn while working gets spent, but this appreciation keeps increasing with time, so that’s the beauty of good work; thank you so much, Sir; I want to share one more thing.
Tell me?
Working with Amitabh Bachchan sir, sharing the screen is in itself every actor’s dream; before that, before Bombay Talkies, in 2005, I had done Viruddh as an assistant director, so I was on the floor with Bachchan sir for about 55-60 days, I was an AD, so after some eight years, when the time for screen sharing with him came, it seemed that whatever happens in life, it’s happening for a reason. One more thing was special for me: Rajeev Ravi, who is the cameraman, this was my second film with Rajiv sir; before this, I had worked with Rajiv sir in Gangs of Wasseypur. Murabba was shot in a different way; mostly, as I told you, things were being improvised, and random things were happening. I did not even know from where the camera would capture me. All this was a lot of new learning experience for me.
