Sumit Arora on Guns and Gulaabs, making Raj and DK show different from Stree and writing comedies: ‘If you ask me to simply crack jokes, I’ll stand mute’

His career turnaround happened with the 2018 hit horror comedy Stree, where Arora’s crackling lines married the quirky world of filmmaker Raj and DK and the film’s assured director Amar Kaushik seamlessly. With the Rajkummar Rao-Shraddha Kapoor led film, a writer was reborn.

“I know everyone has been saying that I am doing back to projects, but when you are in the moment, you don’t really feel anything. It is only when the outside world points it out that you realise the magnitude. I am a workaholic, I love what I do, it gives me an opportunity to collaborate with some of the sharpest minds in the industry. I am on a spinning wheel which I am enjoying right now. I don’t feel tired at all, because I am enjoying what I am doing.

“People look at my Instagram feed and wonder that, ‘Wow he is doing so much!’ That’s true, but I don’t feel that way because my work has finished with these projects, Guns & Gulaabs, Dahaad, Jawan, I am right now involved in other things that are happening!” Arora shares with Indianexpress.com.

Stree, which remains one of his biggest hits yet, has had such a lasting impact on the writer’s career that he says he has constantly tried to mix and match his lineup. Even if has written ‘funny’ lines in Stree, The Family Man and now Guns & Gulaabs, there is no template to his “jokes” and that keeps his lines fresh.

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“All my projects are quite different and that gives me a huge high, to be in different worlds and write according to that setting. After Stree, I got a lot of offers to write horror comedies only. Someone called me to say that their comedy script is ready, but they still want me. I asked, ‘But if the script is ready, what do you need me for?’ And they replied, ‘No just come, add some of your jokes in it.’ I told them that I don’t do jokes, I don’t have any!

“I write a scene, I write dialogues for my characters, jokes happen there. If you ask me to stand up in a room and share some jokes, I would stand mute, I wouldn’t even know what to say! I am not a comedian; I think of interesting things in the landscapeof a story and then those things become funny to the audience. Most of what I write, those things are not funny to the characters, they are being completely serious about their lives and situations.”

Sumit Arora’s latest project is the Netflix series Guns & Gulaabs, for which he has written the dialogues. The Raj and DK created series, written by the duo and their long-time collaborator Suman Kumar, stars Rajkummar Rao, Gulshan Devaiah and Adarsh Gourav and released last week.

Arora says the makers contacted him when they had the screenplay of the first episode ready and told him to have a look as it was a world that he would understand. “Raj and DK were going back to their small-town roots. They grew up in Andhra Pradesh and asked me to have a look at the material to check how it can be adapted to a North Indian setting, what kind of language these people would have and just have fun with it.”

When Arora read the material, he saw a tremendous opportunity to dig in and explore the world and also to have a lot of fun along the way. “I didn’t want to give it a specific lingo, so I thought of a generic small-town lingo, it can be anywhere, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, it was a fictitious land. Screenplay is a composition made by the music director and dialogues are like singing: You have to stay within the composition, and yet add your own soul. So I tried to sing it well.”

The challenge for Sumit Arora with Guns & Gulaabs was that at no point should it sound, look like Stree and generate laughter using tropes of what had worked for the team wonderfully with the 2018 horror comedy. “Back of the mind we knew we are exploring the small-town world again, even though it is very different from Stree… But there is still Rajkummar Rao, Raj and DK, me, so it should still stand on its own. That no one should feel, ‘Oh this is like Stree!’ It had to be a beast of its own.”