Panchayat’s ‘Vidhayak ji’ Pankaj Jha recalls training Sidharth Malhotra with Osho’s techniques: ‘Actors with muscles think…’

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He continued, “I wasn’t sure of how to approach this project, but I was deeply into Osho at that point. I came up with a rather beautiful therapy idea, and gave them a scenario to enact. I told them that their films had just emerged as blockbusters and they’d become stars, and were talking to each other about it. I used to observe them; I trained them for three months… I was paid for it.”

Pankaj said that Osho’s teachings played an important role in not just the course that he designed for the young actors, but also in his own life. He said that he views cinema as purely a ‘business’, and that he is disillusioned by the kind of movies that he sees doing well in theatres. “There is no such thing as being an actor; you need to be open to experiences, you need to be alive. Even on set, when I sense ‘actor ki badboo’ emanating from certain people, I cannot connect with them. I had great fun with the actors on Panchayat; they’re real people. But I see film actors these days becoming paralysed on screen. They think they’re huge stars, but their body language is rigid. Some of them would be better suited to politics, the amount they smile for the cameras.”

Pankaj said that a ‘real actor’ is always more connected to god and nature, but some stars are deeply ‘unreal’. He said that Hindi cinema feels like it is made for people in a ‘rehab centre’, and that audiences have been conditioned to accept ‘nonsense’ in the name of films. “Our films don’t respect the audience,” he said. Panchayat season 3 will be released next week.