Naseeruddin Shah recalls time he stagnated due to overconfidence, Om Puri’s growth shocked him: ‘I had swag, was hero of stage who girls knew’

“When I was 20 years old and I was in the drama school, back then I was overconfident. I thought I was the cat’s whiskers at that time. ‘Why am I not being cast as Hamlet? I can do it; I can do it better!’ I had this attitude, which disappeared gradually before I entered the film industry. When I observed looking back at the three years in NSD,” he says.

Naseeruddin Shah graduated in arts from Aligarh Muslim University in 1971 and attended National School of Drama in Delhi, which is where he met his close friend, late actor Om Puri. Shah recalled his classmate as a “very raw, nervous, shy, introverted, insecure” person, opposite to how he was.

“I came to NSD with a swagger. I was from Aligarh university where I was the hero of the stage, the girls knew me and all that sort of a thing. But when we both were finishing NSD, it suddenly hit me like a sledgehammer, how much Om had grown in three years, and where was I? I was still there where I was when I came to NSD. ‘I could act like this when I came here, so what have I learnt?’ It was a very disturbing thought.

“Along with it was, ‘What am I going to do now? Where am I going to earn my bread?’ Om decided to stay in Delhi, I shifted to the film institute, which was serendipitous because then I started getting work in movies. But never again, after that phase, have I felt, ‘I can easily crack this.’ There is no such part which can be easily cracked.”

Shah cites the example of a bit role he did in Neeraj Pandey’s drama thriller Aiyaary, for which he practiced for days to get the speech right. “I wanted to get that accent right, because when Maharashtrians speak Hindi, they do it in a particular way. So I consulted my friend Satish Shah, who is a genius in these dialects, and he coached me. So, I am not overconfident, nor am I insecure. I was insecure when I had to sing songs and run around trees, because I hadn’t practiced all that!”

 

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While Shah is currently gearing up for the release of ZEE5’s Taj: Reign of Revenge, in which he stars as stars as Mughal emperor Akbar, the actor says he isn’t a fan of watching his own work, patting himself on the back. Shah insists he is extremely critical of his performances and can always see holes in all of them.

“I don’t always watch every film I have done. Some of them because they are unbearable and some because I don’t know how exactly it worked out. But I don’t rewatch my old work, I don’t like to dwell on the past, keep watching something wonderful like Mirch Masala, Sparsh, I don’t indulge myself in that. It would be the saddest thing if I end up as an 80-year-old, sitting in my farmhouse, watching my movies when I was 25. No, I don’t want that to happen.

“But I am aware how this has turned out and sometimes, just to satisfy my curiosity, I watch some films I have done. But not always.  I am pretty harsh on myself. I am not easily satisfied. There are so many movies in which I have supposedly done well but when I look back, I know I could have done better. With age, such realisations do occur,” he concludes.