From college student to Bollywood history: The unknown role Allu Sirish played in Aamir Khan’s 100-crore blockbuster Ghajini

In a conversation on the chat show Ali Talkies with host Ali, Sirish spoke about how it all happened. “I’ve been a big fan of Aamir Khan since Lagaan and Ghulam,” he said, adding, “I would daydream of working with him.”

Coming from a family deeply rooted in Telugu cinema, Aamir Khan represented something aspirational, a different industry, a different scale, a different kind of storytelling. Allu Sirish had watched those films the way most fans do. He never seriously expected the gap to close.

Then it did. “I didn’t believe it when the Ghajini project came to me,” he admitted, adding, “I was in the last year of my college when I joined the project.” A final-year college student, stepping into one of the most anticipated Hindi productions of that era. He co-produced the Hindi version of Ghajini alongside his father, veteran producer Allu Aravind. For his father, the project also carried personal significance. “My father was coming to Bollywood as a producer after 10 to 15 years,” Sirish noted. For the Allu family, this wasn’t simply another film on the slate, it was a homecoming of sorts.

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What they returned with was history. Aamir Khan’s Ghajini was the highest-grossing Bollywood film of 2008, becoming the first Hindi film to cross the Rs 100 crore net mark at the Indian box office.

Allu Sirish with his idol Aamir Khan, the actor he once daydreamed about working with, and eventually did.

What’s striking, though, is that Allu Sirish doesn’t speak about the film in terms of records or legacy. He speaks about what it felt like. “While I like the original Ghajini, we made the Hindi version better,” he said plainly, adding, “Personally, I liked working with the film, and the experience I gained, so I love the Hindi version.” There’s no performance in that. It’s just someone who got close to something he loved and came away with more than he expected.