Singh doesn't want to be king

Twenty-something Arunoday Singh has rejected the idea of being what he calls a US-returned Yankophile and wants to meet Bollywood on his own terms

Twenty-something Arunoday Singh has rejected the idea of being what he calls "a US-returned Yankophile" and wants to meet Bollywood on his own terms.

Arunoday Singh plays Sonam Kapoor's childhood friend in the upcoming film Aisha. PIC/ YAKUB MERCHANT

Aisha is Singh's third film -- Sikandar was his first and the second, Mirch, is yet to be released. Says Singh, "Vinay Shukla of Godmother has written and directed Mirch. It was great fun to do but it was what Bollywood calls 'art cinema'. So Big Pictures has produced it and they are just sitting on it."

Bollywood ban
Singh saw no Hindi films during his childhood. Refuting my belief that you cannot escape Bollywood when you live in India, he asserts, "Yes, you can. Where we lived, there were no cinema houses. My mother didn't let me watch television. When I was six years old, I went to an international boarding school in Kodaikanal. For our classes and book reports, we read English novels and watched English films. I remember seeing Bollywood was when I came to Mumbai -- all I saw on the drive from Mumbai airport to the Malabar Hill guesthouse were film posters on the streets." The earliest recall he has of watching a Bollywood film is Zanjeer. "I liked Amitabh's earlier films, Deewar and Zanjeer. Not Sholay so much."

Play time
Acting in school plays gave him "a sense of affirmation that somebody actually enjoyed what I did". He became a "play fiend"; and headed to New York to work with a theatre company.

Singh emphasises that he was not seduced into Bollywood. He says, "I am seduction free. If somebody says that you can get a role in a film which Karan Johar is directing, but they won't give you the script, I'd say 'No' because that's just not how I function. Just a name doesn't impress me. Nothing drew me to Bollywood. I am an actor." The six-feet-four-inches tall giant reasons that when the industry has the right to audition actors, actors too should be able to reject films based on the script.u00a0

Singh was convinced that he would find not work in Bollywood because "I believe that commercial Bollywood cinema requires a separate special skill set. It's like doing theatre and opera -- you can't necessarily do both unless you are lucky." But he auditioned for Aisha, in which he plays Sonam's childhood friend "who goes abroad for 15 years and comes back as the suave Marlboro man who gives her butterflies." Singh says that he has thoroughly enjoyed playing the role. "I can't believe people pay me for this," he says.

I caution him that almost everybody I have known in my long careeru00a0 eventually gets sucked into the system. He laughs, "Yeah, my mother tells me the same thing. But what might save me is that I know for a fact how easy it is to lose yourself. So I watch myself."

Bollywood News Service