Swanand Kirkire is trying to win the battle of the bulge. He’s been avoiding beer and samosas and reacquainting himself to the joys of nariyal pani and salad. He blames filmmaker Prakash Jha for it. “If Prakashji hadn’t given me this opportunity to act, I wouldn’t have cleaned up my habits.” After years of watching the game from the periphery, Swanand is all set to enter the acting arena with Prakash Jha Productions Crazy Cukkad Family, directed by debutant Ritesh Menon. Over a glass of nimbu paani, shaken, not stirred, Swanand reveals that he shares a long association with Prakash Jha. “I used to write for serials when I first came to Mumbai. I had a concept for an episode that I was co-writing with a friend and had gone to give a briefing to Prakashji. He is a lover of arts and used to frequent the impromptu meetings of poets and writers. He liked what I shared in such soirees and always encouraged me. Later, I even started writing for him in films.” The filmmaker had been asking him to lose weight all this while but it’s only recently that he took him seriously. “It’s not for my role in Crazy Cukkad Family, where I’m required to be plump but for overall fitness and of course, future projects. My body told me to stop certain things, ek ishara kiya usne! I paid heed to it.”
Swanand is an NSD graduate and hence no stranger to acting. He is touring the country performing the play Colour Blind, starring him and Kalki Koechlin and directed by Manav Kaul. What’s surprising is that he took so long to make a transition from stage to cinema. “Yes, there have been offers before but I’ve never gone beyond a cameo here and there. But something told me to take the plunge this time.” Crazy… is a comedy about a dysfunctional family and although being a Maharashtrian, Swanand says he fitted right in the Punjabi madness. “We have tried to raise laughs through everyday situations. I loved the concept and immediately said yes.”
Another reason he said yes was because he believes niche cinema is here to stay. “There is a certain audience, which is hungry for good content and is willing to buy a ticket even if there are no stars in the project. Cinema is all about telling stories and I want to be part of good stories.”
He was batchmates with Nawazuddin Siddiqui in NSD while Irrfan and Manoj Bajpayee were his seniors. He reveals he used to fight with Nawaz from day one. “Nawaz had fixed ideas about acting, which differed from mine. It was only when I directed him in my interpretation of Riders To The Sea, where he played an 80-year-old woman and was hugely appreciated for it, that he thawed to my point of view. Now, we’re best friends. He asks me to revive the play whenever he grows nostalgic.” Swanand looks back at his salad days with rose-tinted affection. “We didn’t have money to pay rent sometimes and subsisted on tea and biscuits. But we had passion enough to move the world. Our nights were spent discussing cinema and literature. A ‘quarter’ of old monk was a luxury and we divided every drop. I’ve had the choicest of liquors afterwards, Black label, Chivas… but never came close to experiencing the high generated by sharing that humble quarter in the company of close friends.”
He admits he’s a late bloomer when it comes to acting. “My friends had a burning passion for acting and veered towards that. My interests were towards direction and composition and writing.” He hasn’t fared far too badly either. His two National Awards, one for writing Bande mein tha dum from Munna bhai MBBS (2007) and the other for Behti hawa sa tha woh for 3 Idiots (2009) are ample testimony to that. “Those awards mattered because my parents living in Indore finally realised that their son was doing something worthwhile. I took them for the ceremony in Delhi and there were tears in their eyes. It meant more to them than it did to me.” His parents are trained classical musicians but were never able to carve a career out of it. “So in a way, it was their award.One can never pay back all that your parents did for you. We belong to a middle-class background. Children of my parent’s friends were either doctors or engineers or in the IAS. They worried about me eking out a living as a writer in Mumbai and in that one moment, I negated their anxiety.”
Swanand’s childhood was spent listening to good music and in the company of musicians. “I developed a good ear for music. That helped when I started writing in films.” He has also sung in films like Hazaron Khawaishein Aisi, his latest offering being Monta re from Lootera. But he doesn’t see himself as a fulltime playback singer. “Baawra mann was something that I wrote while in college. You can call it a semi-autobiographical song about my hopes and dreams. Composer Shantanu Moitra made director Sudhir Mishra hear it. They incorporated it in Hazaron and made me sing it as well. I’m a product of the aspirations of my friends,” he laughs.
Swanand insists there isn’t a bigger commercial cinema buff than him in Indore. “I loved Jeetendra’s, Mithun Chakraborty’s and Dharmendra’s movies. I was a child of the ’80s and grew up loving all the trashy films of that era. I am a fan even now.” The ’80s kitsch is back and Swanand shudders at that. “Thankfully, it’s not a full blown assault, otherwise it would feel as though one was living in a time loop.” He adds those films scored with their emotional content despite the garishness, something absent in their new age copies. He believes the Internet has revived people’s interest in the past. There is a healthy irreverence too. “We aren’t blind to our failings. People are revisiting the oddities with a sense of fun. Humour leads to introspection and that’s something we lack as a society – the ability to laugh at ourselves. We take ourselves way too seriously.”
He moves around in the august company of Rajkumar Hirani and Aamir Khan but says he isn’t bound by any ‘camps’. “Those days are gone. Today, lyricists and writers like Irshad Kamil, Anvita Dutt Guptan, Amitabh Bhattacharya and I regularly meet and talk shop. We even recommend projects to each other. We discuss poetry and cinema and read out extracts from our private writings. We are trying to revive the culture of ’50s and ’60s.” He reasons there is less insecurity because there are so many ways to make money. “I give motivational lectures and do theatre. Then we get money by working in ads as well. TV is another big option. So that image of starved genius struggling to make ends meet no longer holds true today.”
Ask him when he would be directing his own film and he replies, “Soon.” He has yet to kick out the procrastination. “You have to be after it yaar. I always found so much else to do in life though I’m close to finishing the script,” he winks.
Is that why he’s still single – because he couldn’t pursue someone doggedly? He says he’s never been lucky in love. “Not that I haven’t had my share of girlfriends but I have yet to find that special someone. I’d love to get settled, especially now, when I’ve reached a level of financial security. But… you live in hope…” Amen to that!