Omung and Vanita Kumar Khandula look at Monalisa while designing their extravagant Bollywood setsAs the door to the Andheri office of Bollywood’s busiest set designers Omung and Vanita Kumar Khandula opens, you know you are about to enter a fantasyland. The wall facing the entrance is a microcosm of Broadway. It’s plastered with theatre masterpieces such as Phantom of the Opera, Moulin Rouge, Cats, Les Miserables and The Lion King.“Films and TV are a calling but theatre is an abiding passion,” says Vanita, who’s worked for 12 years in Shiamak Davar’s dance troupe and is gearing up for a stage musical. Once you are past the wall and into the primary area, you are almost transported into the algae-like surreal dreamworld of Saawariya. Except that the duo’s studio is more vivid than the dominating greens and blues they chose for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film, thus turning it into a visual treat.The space is as larger-than-life as a Bollywood film. And it is a kaleidoscope of global arts—a Charlie Chaplin puppet collected from Prague, a wooden Pinocchio from Austria, mood masks from Venice, curtains with prints of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha’s designs, Monalisa frames from Paris, an avalanche of books on art, architecture, interior décor and films and a centrepiece poster of Ranbir Kapoor in a towel against a curtain from a sequence of their last big project, Saawariya. “Our office reflects our character and nurtures our creativity. It is not a boring, cubical space,” says wife Vanita. There is a method in the riot of colours though. “When I go blank doing my sketches, I just look around and the images start pouring in,” says Omung, as he reclines on a comfy bed—yes, that’s also part of the workspace—covered with a multi-hued sheet and done up further with ethnic print cushions. “Since a creative job has no fixed hours of working, the office must be like home,” he says. As much as there is comfort in the duo’s office, there’s also a lot of commotion—with images of talking witches, walking tigers and laughing Buddhas. “Motion is an immovable feature of our workspace, just as a hint of Monalisa is there in every film of ours,” says Omung. No wonder a giant replica of the Da Vinci masterpiece—cut into pieces with one frame showing the famous crossed hands, another exposing the smile ad yet another the side-view of the face—graces the wall opposite the designers’ sketch table, where they have prepared the blueprint of the sets of their forthcoming films Love Story 2050 and Yuvraaj and their on-air TV serial Ramayan.
