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Filmmaker Aditya Chopra made a much-publicised on-camera appearance in the recent Netflix documentary series The Romantics, about the legacy of the YRF studio. In the series, Adi Chopra spoke at length about YRF’s history, his family, and his own career. The famously reclusive filmmaker broke out as a director with the seminal ’90s hit Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, but has since helmed only three other films — Mohabbatein, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi and Befikre.
For Befikre, he reached out to comedian Sanjay Rajoura to write the standup material for Ranveer Singh’s character in the film. In an interview with The Lallantop five years ago, Rajoura recalled working on the film. The point that the comedian was trying to make was that Bollywood dilutes everything, and he experienced this firsthand when the jokes that he wrote for Befikre were watered down to appeal to the broadest possible audience. He looked back on his experience with embarrassment.
Rajoura wondered how a stand-up comedian from New Delhi was performing in Paris in Hindi in the first place. In the film Ranveer plays a comic from Delhi’s Karol Bagh, who meets the ‘progressive’ character played by Vaani Kapoor in Paris. Rajoura said in Hindi, “Bollywood is the biggest curse in the creative arts field in our country. Bollywood got into Coke Studio, you can’t make an independent film in this country without Bollywood’s support. Look at comedy. They even came to me, for that ghatiya film Befikre, Aditya Chopra’s comeback film, supposedly one of the biggest movies of that year.”
He continued, “Aditya Chopra narrated the story of the film to me, and made me sign a non-disclosure agreement to not discuss it with anybody else. I thought, ‘This movie has been made 500 times already’… The hero in the film is Ranveer Singh, and get a load of this, he does standup comedy in Paris, in Hindi. I wrote the standup comedy, sir. It was such an uninspiring script, I thought I should elevate it. I wrote some material about gender, but he told me, ‘Sanjay, my audience is from Bihar to New York’. The worst bits they kept, the rest they removed.”
Rajoura said that once he was done with his commitment, he thought to himself, “Yeh kya museebat mor le li maine.” He added, “Mera dimaag kharab hogaya. Gand likhna bhi bohot mushkil kaam hai (I lost my mind, it’s not easy to write trash).” He said that he initially hoped that nobody would find out that he was behind the comedy in the film, but later came to accept it.
Befikre was critically reviled upon release in 2016. Chopra reflected on the film’s financial failure briefly in The Romantics.
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