Lucky manu

Long before he received awards for best dialogue for Oye Lucky,Lucky Oye!,Manu Rishi Chadha,was just another tormented young man. “My father would admonish me for taking no interest in our automobile spare parts shop on Asaf Ali Road in Delhi. My heart was not in the spare parts and I would sneak out to do theatre,” says the actor who turned writer by default.

“I was offered a side role in Khosla ka Ghosla,which I turned down. Later,when director of the film Dibakar Banerjee was scripting his next film,Oye Lucky…,he was on the lookout for someone who was an authority on the Dilli dialect and someone told him about me. This time,he roped me not only to write the dialogue but also convinced me to play the sidekick of the protagonist played by Abhay Deol,” says Manu,who has just finished writing the dialogue for Aisha an Anil Kapoor Production in which Sonam Kapoor plays the eponymous role. “It is an Indian adaptation of the Jane Austen classic Emma. I guess,it was the awards for Lucky that made me a name to reckon and got me this proud assignment,” he says,adding that Abhay Deol plays the main role opposite Sonam in the film directed by newcomer Rajshri Ojha. “I had already begun to write and the film based on my first script,Tina ki Chaabi,is releasing in November. It is directed by another Delhi guy Amit Saxena,whose directorial debut was the John Abraham-Bipasha Basu-starrer Jism. “I have known Amit for a long time and along with Dibakar—whom we call a Punjabi Bengali because he was brought up in Karol Bagh—we are quite a team,yakking away in the Delhi lingo much to the amazement of the Mumbaikars around us.” Manu,who is willy-nilly a torch-bearer of the newage cinema which is realistic,irreverent and unpredictable,names Amar Akbar Anthony as his favourite film. “True,this cinema is not escapist or professing lofty ideals and the protagonist is given to human frailities,but it is finding takers because people all over the world are identifying with the characters. We can’t any more show the hero jumping off a flying chopper and chasing the goons,can we?”