A reporter's personal impression of Nawazuddin Siddiqui

Siddiqui can blow your socks off in performance after performance but he can often be tongue-tied when the subject is not his area of comfort, writes Vanita-Kohli Khandekar

The first time I met Nawazuddin Siddiqui was on a cold winter evening in Delhi last year. This was while anchoring an on-stage discussion between him and Anupam Kher on the potential for Indian cinema overseas. Kher had the star-struck Delhi audience eating out of his hand. Siddiqui on the other hand was somewhat awkward. At that time I thought it was his lack of comfort with English and did what any anchor would do – kept asking him questions in Hindi. While that helped, Siddiqui didn’t exactly set the stage on fire. Later we had a long chat off-stage (and I was rather startled to see this farmer’s son rolling his own fancy looking cigarette). That is when he told me that his heartbeat is normal only when he faces the camera. And he was petrified that I would ask some “bhaari bharkam (heavy) intellectual sawaal (question).” So he kept it short.
 
The honesty was refreshing, but the irony was something else. Here was this guy who could blow your socks off in performance after performance and he was tongue-tied. But that was probably because the subject was not his area of comfort. Get Siddiqui going on the right subject – acting – and this National School of Drama graduate is a treat to talk to.

 
The first proper interview I have done with him was earlier this month in Mumbai just before the release of Bajrangi Bhaijaan. We spoke for more than an hour and that is when I got a better sense of the man. Most questions and topics don’t interest Siddiqui. He tries to be polite and feign interest but his heart really is in the next role, the next character he should tackle. So ask him questions about his childhood – he is one of the nine siblings in a joint family of about 85 people - or about his parents and the answers are not as detailed as, say how he went through preparing for Ketan Mehta’s Manjhi –the Mountain Man, his next release. So how do his parents feel about his success – he shrugs. Siddiqui never went home during the long years of struggle. (and he doesn’t discuss it at any great length either) And his father was never confident that being in films would do him any good.
 
He is more eloquent while talking about this one scene in Sriram Raghavan’s hit Badlapur (2015) that is bothering him. He doesn’t think he got the nuance right. “The way I want to execute my characters… can’t do it  in every film,” he agonises.
 
What attracted him to acting was the chemistry between the audience and the actor but what will keep him here is the chemistry with his directors. “It is a very important relationship. This whole game is of make-believe. And trust between the actor and director and vice versa is important,” says Siddiqui.
 
Isn’t he afraid that nobody will tell him when he is doing a bad job, now that he is successful? “My brother (Shamas Siddiqui, a TV director) tells me bluntly when I do a scene badly,” says Siddiqui.