Lagey raho, Arshad bhai!

With the success of the Munnabhai sequel, Arshad Warsi is getting the recognition he deserves.

At the premiere of Lagey Raho Munnabhai, held recently at Mumbai's Fame Adlabs, actor Arshad Warsi broke into an impromptu dance. With a white coat slung casually over a white shirt and a pair of jeans, Arshad flung his hands out, tilted his body to a precise degree and moved in rhythm while gently smiling at the flashing camera bulbs.

In those brief moments, in a jam-packed auditorium, Arshad had engaged in a little party of his own. This spontaneous, rhythmic jig was perhaps the ultimate dance of victory at having delivered a hit film.

"Ya, it'll be tough to ignore me from now on," Arshad chuckles. We're on the phone and I can hear his son cackling in the background; very soon he will giggle, point a chubby finger at the television screen and warble, "Da da!" when he sees his daddy onscreen.

And daddy dearest is all over the place. On a news channel, film critic Rajiv Masand referred to Arshad as "the real star of Lagey Raho Munnabhai; worthy of a lot of awards".

Film critic Taran Adarsh says, "Even a smirk or an exclamation from him makes you flex your facial muscles." Blogs and online newspaper websites are also giving rave reviews to Rajkumar Hirani's second successful venture under Vidhu Vinod Chopra's production banner.

"The real love story," says one blogger, "is between Sanjay and Arshad." The demeanour of the forever-cheerful sidekick Circuit, slouching under the weight of innumerable gold chains, loveable in his devotion to Munnabhai (even when he's holding a gun to someone's head), the slur that gives the impression of perpetual drunkenness... these have all helped Warsi to firmly stamp himself on Bollywood.

The actor, whose first job as a choreographer in Boney Kapoor's dud Roop Ki Rani, Choron Ka Raja (he choreographed one song) went unnoticed, laughs heartily when I mention the "love story" bit on the blog to him. "Maybe Sanjay and I should do a Hindi version of Brokeback Mountain together now."

While he may be saying this facetiously, somewhere Arshad Warsi is genuinely "insecure and still desperate to grab a variety of roles". Which is why Circuit will go into hibernation for a long, long time ("unless Raju Hirani wants to make another film in the Munnabhai series") "" or, as Warsi warns, he will end up being the murderer of the character.

Co-star Vidya Balan agrees. "Filmmakers should offer a variety of roles to Arshad. Just look at the scene in Lagey Raho Munnabhai where Circuit is crying silently when Munnabhai slaps him hard. It's a gripping performance." Director Hirani says, "He's a very important actor of our times.

He takes the script, analyses the character, fumbles purposely with sentences in scenes (the way we do in real-life conversations) and does something extraordinary with every single line, integrating a part of his own persona into the character."

It shows in the performance: Warsi's Circuit is a character that has been created with meticulous attention to detail, built from the ground up in a way that one seldom sees in commercial Hindi cinema.

Critics feel that the journey only gets tougher from here for Warsi and that he'll still have to choose scripts with ease, especially as he is yet to deliver a solo hit.

Kabir Kaushik, who directed him in the film Seher (where he played the role of a righteous policeman), says, "Arshad can project a range of emotions on screen. He's very convincing."

For the actor, this modest, small budget film that gave him critical acclaim still means a lot because it dared to present him in a completely contrasting role. He's already given a nod to Kaushik's next and has verbally agreed to Vikram Bhatt's forthcoming venture. He says, "I don't act. I simply become the character."

For someone who initially wasn't enthusiastic about acting ("I'm a freak case") and was happy travelling, being a house husband and dancing, Arshad's first film Tere Mere Sapne made him a success.

What followed subsequently were disasters because Arshad admittedly didn't know the industry and didn't really care. His attitude changed when veterans like Jeetendra and Yash Raj Chopra started ringing the wisdom bell loudly in his ears. "Yash Raj Chopra very recently told me, 'From now on, don't settle for mediocrity. If you don't have good work, wait for the right role'."

The journey of Arshad Warsi from signing bad scripts and films carelessly, to waiting patiently for the right roles to come his way has been an excruciating one. He says he had no films in hand for eight months after Munnabhai MBBS was released.

"I wasn't overconfident but I never imagined getting no films. Jeetendra had warned me once. He said, 'Today you're getting tonnes of roles. One day you'll have no work. Don't give up. If you manage to cross that time you'll be a success'."

Now that success is on his side, Arshad is having fun observing some industry members who are suddenly warming up to him.

"Earlier, there used to be a vacuum around me, no one wanted to be near me because I was a failure. In fact, at one of the IIFA awards ceremonies, one of the current top actors was rude to me on my face, in front of so many people. He'd injured his foot and I bailed him out by performing on his behalf at the very last minute. We've even worked together once and delivered a hit."

"You never make a true friend here," he says. "There's so much money involved here that you just have to be a good commodity that should be able to generate a better product every time."

He adds, "Why do you think I'm offered only comedy roles? My first film saw me as a comedian and no one ever wanted to take a chance with me doing serious roles."

While life for Arshad is changing for the better, some things, he admits, will never change. "I still get nervous at the start of my films, my face still breaks into pimples with all the tension," he quips. Post Lagey Raho... his face is radiant. The glow of success?