Reality Bytes

“It’s the story of a girl who ran away from home at 14,gets kidnapped in Kolkata only to find herself enslaved by a sadomasochist,a man who derives sexual gratification by inflicting or submitting to physical or emotional abuse. He is a trainer in sadomasochism and he takes her under his wing,” says Sharma. Champa’s painful letter to the UN had stirred them all,including the filmmaker Nidhish who is making Champa’s Paradise. Today,Champa works with an UN NGO that helps prostitutes rehabilitate.

Sharma,meanwhile,has signed two more films — Youthopia,again by Nidhish about four friends who rebel for a cause and Arup Dutta’s (of Morning Walk fame) Dillogical,the story of a boy who is about to commit suicide. The subjects offer a slice of life,being loosely inspired by life,news clippings and events and their biting reality makes them irresisitible as subject matter. Sharma was last seen in Dibakar Bannerjee’s LSD,and ever since,he has felt that every tabooed subject and issues central to our lives should be brought to life on cinema.

“It excites me when censors slap an Adult certificate on a film just because it’s vocal or expressive. I am not talking about porn but films like Black Friday,Udaan and Dev D,” says the actor whose first love remains theatre. “Theatre is an actor’s medium whereas cinema and television are director’s medium.

They are clinical and technical in approach,you are confined to their VFX walls,” he rues.

Television as a medium has also caught Sharma’s fancy. He will soon play the role of a gangster in Gunahon Ka Devta on Imagine. “Here,the protagonist Avdesh Singh Thakur essayed by me is inspired by UP’s gangster Shri Prakash Shukla who became a gangster at the age of 13 when he shot a man who whistled at his sister,” he says. The character Sharma plays turns into a criminal after he loses his entire family in a single incident on their way back from his brother’s wedding,and the newly-wed bride brings him up with a vengeance. “She steers him towards crime and guns and prepares him up to take revenge,” he adds. “I was reticient at first to submit to an overdose of melodrama. But the makers of Gunahon convinced me there would be acting workshops,it would be real,set in the badlands of UP and will have a completely different style of shooting,” says Sharma.