Aamir Khan talks to Abhijit Majumder about playing a kid half his age in 3 Idiots, choosing a script, Kiran Bedi, Salman Khan, and his favourite Shah Rukh film

"Pablo is never still."

Aamir Khan gets up, fidgets, shifts from this feet to that, maunders, bites nails, plonks right back into the sofa absentmindedly sticking up a gawky foot in the air, lifts this and that distractedly...

He broke into an engrossed, elaborate acting sequence in the middle of the interview on Thursday, mimicking his teenage nephew, Mansoor Khan's son Pablo.

It was a rare, unexpected glimpse of how Bollywood's best-known perfectionist perfects his role, hacking variously into the world of a tough cop, revolutionary, killing machine or, in this case, the turbid mind of a brat.

Pablo is one of his two muses for 3 Idiots, which opens on December 24. In the movie, 44-year-old Aamir plays a 22-year-old student. The other, surprisingly, is A R Murugadoss, director of Ghajini.



"Murugadoss is in his mid-thirties, but he is so boyish. He's amazed by everything, there's always curiosity in his eyes," said Aamir, chatting over tea and sandwiches at his nephew Imran's Pali Hill bungalow, allowing a peek into his chaotic world of obsessive, compulsive order. Excerpts:

An offer at 44 to act 22... and you took it up?
[Starts laughing] Very valid question. I have been asking myself that. Audacious step... in keeping with all my mad decisions in the past. After four films on Bhagat Singh, for instance, we went and made the fifth one, Rang De Basanti. Or when people were making films in Switzerland wearing DKNY, we went and shot Lagaan in dhoti in a small village.

In 3 Idiots, age was the challenge. I told Raju [director, Rajkumar Hirani], 'Why waste time on me when you can use a 22-year-old?' He said, 'Rancho is what you are in real life... unconventional, always goes against the tide, breaks rules.' He wanted that belief to come through.