Ranbir Kapoor: The Natural
No chinks, no kinks. Well, except for an inch-long cut on his right cheek, sustained when he was rushing to the loo as a child and fell face-first on the pot. A deviated septum which has him breathing from his mouth, making him talk and eat too fast.
But Bollywood can see no wrong in Ranbir Kapoor, whose Raajneeti has just had the second biggest opening weekend ever, making Rs 51 crore with a 1,900 print run. In a short career of just six films so far, of which one, Ajab Prem ki Ghazab Kahani, was the second biggest grosser of last year, Ranbir is the fresh prince of Bollywood, an actor with Range Rover-loads of charisma.
At 27, the fourth generation actor, who grew up in a home of music sittings, costume fittings, story narrations and filmi parties, is busy collecting ace directors and scoring unusual movies in an industry that has started to nudge, if not push, the envelope.
Even as he waits for the release of Siddharth Raj Anand's love story Anjaana Anjaani, about two people who meet as each is on the verge of suicide, he is starting work with Imtiaz Ali on Rock Star where he plays a Jat from Delhi who wants to be a musician, followed by Anurag Basu's Silence where he is a hearing and speech impaired man, a second film with Ayan Mukerji, and an as yet untitled film with Mani Ratnam.
The range he's shown, from the winsome puppy dog of Saawariya to the studied anti-hero of Raajneeti, looks all set to be stretched further. Not surprising then, that there's a spring in the step of producers searching for the next big thing, a gleam of hope for writers looking for a star to peg their difficult-to-sell scripts on and excitement among directors suffering from terminal exhaustion that afflicts everyone waiting for the industry's biggest stars, Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, to choose the one film a year they will do.
In an industry where fates are written off every Friday, he is seen as the boy who will stay. But if filmmakers are prisoners of actors' whims, stars are equally vulnerable, literally at the receiving end of the one phone call that will change the course of their monochromatic careers.
Sometimes it makes them sign a raft of stale as day-old-samosa movies which are then consigned to the rubbish heap at the box office as happened to Hrithik Roshan after Kaho Naaâ¦Pyaar Hai and sometimes it forces them to sit out a year like Shahid Kapoor before Ali gave him the much-needed Jab We Met. Ranbir himself wants to be India's biggest star and greatest actor, but that's in another 10 years.
For now, he's content to just be, submerge himself in his latest film, give himself over to the joy of filmmaking, even blurring the line between real and reel. He has, as his closest friend and director of the fine coming-of-age film, Wake Up Sid, Mukerji, says, "arrived. But it would be a mistake for him to think that it's more than that.'' Yes, he is making more money - Rs 7-10 crore per film, and Rs 7.5 crore for each of the six endorsements he has signed.
He has just bought himself an Audi R 8 which he intends to drive late at night, listening to music he is discovering for Ali's new film, U2, Elton John, Bob Dylan and Green Day. And he does like the good things of life, from shopping at Prada for house slippers to picking up shirts at James Perse.
But he is completely fearless about his choices and focused on his work. And self driven - after all, in a household where the 15-year-old pug Dudley eats pate for dinner and wears raincoats bought in London, money is not the greatest motivator. "He sits with me for 12 hours on a music recording and comes to scout for locations in Delhi," says Ali.
"Ranbir doesn't have to but he doesn't like taking short cuts."
Recalling how he crafted the character of Harpeet Singh for Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, writer Jaideep Sahni says, "He soaked everything Shimit (Amin, the director) threw at him like a sponge and then showed us the guy as he saw him." This despite the only salesman he'd ever seen was the guy who delivered the family BMW home.
Ranbir, says Prakash Jha, who offered him the complex role of Arjun/Michael Corleone immediately after Saawariya, is a "lovely guy, as much at ease with the spotboy as he was with senior actors". A team player, a chronic prankster, a mix of innocence and restlessness are adjectives thrown around about him in a profession where carping is first nature.
The goodwill may not last for long, and he who has seen the transience of fame affecting his father knows this best. A stellar year like 2009, where he excelled critically in Wake Up Sid and Rocket Singh and commercially in the wacky Ajab Prem ki Ghazab Kahani may well be followed by a year of learning to live with failure.
But he believes, as his grandfather wrote in an autograph in 1952, humility is an artist's greatest virtue. "My mother once told me handsome is as handsome does. Stardom is not about getting a table at a new restaurant. It's about signing someone's autograph book even when you're busy or returning a beggar's smile. I don't believe in bodyguards and dark glasses. The more attention you ask for, the more you'll get," he says.
His mother often features in his conversations and he's proud to admit he is a "mamma's boy" - she still cuts his nails, chooses his toothpaste and monitors his vitamin intake. He's happiest when he's on a film set or with his friends, most of them second/third generation aspiring filmmakers like B.R. Chopra's grandson Abhay (his sometime roommate in New York) and David Dhawan's son Rohit. "I'm an actor, there's nothing else I can do. At other times, I'm a film groupie. Like right now, I'm dying to see Raavan and Guzarish."
Cheesy celebritydom, to which he briefly succumbed when doing joint gush-fests with former girlfriend Deepika Padukone, doesn't interest him anymore. Pretty good for a child who spent his school years at Bombay Scottish in the bottom three of the class, drank his father's after shave and had to be rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped and spent two years of HR College in Mumbai "bumming around and doing the bad things kids do when they're suddenly given freedom".
His mother, former actor Neetu Singh, recalls that she was called to school every year between Class I and Class XII, either because he had looked up a teacher's skirt forcing her to forever wear saris or dropped his pants. "At HR College, his attendance was 2 per cent. Can you believe that?" she says laughing.
Slackers of the world can rejoice. Ranbir would always watch the first day first show of every film with his mother right through college. It was a given that he would take to the family business, as it happens in most Bollywood film dynasties, where retaining the father's stardom is ingrained in the DNA. But rather than be paralysed by the expectations, Ranbir applied to the School of Visual Arts in New York ("because it had a colourful website," he says facetiously) where he made student films, watched world cinema and learnt to live on his own, surviving on a budget, washing the dishes and doing the laundry.
Three years on, he went to The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, where he studied for a year, and lived in the East Village. "That's what gave him this alternative head space," says Karan Johar, pointing out that it makes him gravitate towards arthouse cinema as easily as mainstream potboilers.
When he came back, armed with a CV and determination, he asked Sanjay Leela Bhansali for a job as an assistant on Black. He got it. "I was getting beaten up, abused, doing everything from cleaning the floor to fixing the lights from 7 a.m. to 4 a.m., but I was
learning every day," he says. He took a hiatus, spending a year "getting to know myself," and doing an hour each of Hindi diction, action and dance. Taking his father's advice, he watched the great Indian masters, from Guru Dutt to Bimal Roy, from Mehboob Khan to Raj Kapoor.
Then Saawariya happened and his rocket was up and away despite the film crashlanding. Born into a family where marble swans share space with Lalique crystal horses, where Abu-Sandeep tapestries are draped casually next to Jehangir Sabavala paintings, he is motivated by finding his place in the family history. He's not working to enjoy the perks of life.
Work is the perk of life for him. If Raj Kapoor was the loving grandfather who washed his feet when he was bitten by red ants while playing in the garden of RK House in Chembur, he is also an enormous shadow that sons Randhir and Rishi struggled to emerge from. Bollywood families crowd the road he has lived on since 1989. One star son, Sanjay Dutt, whose gym he often uses, has had more twists and turns in his life than a NASCAR race track.
Another Pali Hill neighbour, Imran Khan, has also seen how temporary success can be. Ranbir's own father's rants, fuelled by his decline as a leading man and perhaps generous doses of Scotch, are not something he will forget in a hurry. With so many markers pointing him to possible self-destruction, it is unlikely that his intelligence will let him down.
Mukerji, the wisest 26-year-old in Bollywood, says he needs to just do the films he wants to, not what others want him to. Ranbir shows a smart head by keeping his lifestyle simple despite the money in the bank that his father handles, "because I don't understand numbers".
He travels with his makeup man, a hairstylist and the spotboy, three men who tell him exactly when he's good and when he's horrid. He has a manager who handles his six endorsements: Pepsi, John Players, Virgin Mobile, Panasonic, Nissan Micra, and soon Hero Honda. He shares a manager with his father, the venerable Shanti Malik, who is the guardian at the gate, occupying a room leading up to the house which is littered with silver jubilee trophies of films which fed off the Rishi Kapoor charisma.
There's a story behind each plaque and Shantiji as he is called, he of the polished black hair and equally shiny shoes, is a great storyteller. There's Nagina, after which "Chintuji" became the highest taxpayer in Bollywood.
There's Deewana where Shah Rukh Khan started, which he acknowledged recently when he invited Rishi and Neetu to a party at Mannat. A few steps down from the house is the cabana that has witnessed many conversations between his parents, some conducted through the dog Dudley when they were at the height of hostilities, and a copybook garden where a young Ranbir would practice his karate moves.
Inside the house, as a pressure cooker lets off steam and his mother's dog, Pagli, whines longingly (her mistress has been in London for a month), Bollywood's future is talking about his dreams, the visions that come to him when he's staring at the ceiling in his room, whether of a scene from a film, a performance by a contemporary he is jealous about, a strand of hair or even football, a game he is passionate about - a signed T-shirt from Lionel Messi is the subject of much excitement.
It's this boyish enthusiasm that Bollywood will try to bottle and market in its eternal quest for youth. It's this spontaneity Bhansali tried to exploit in the towel dance in Saawariya where a naked Ranbir pranced about unashamedly.
And it's this innate desire to please that made him behave like an energiser bunny in Ajab Prem ki Ghazab Kahani. Just three years old in the profession, Ranbir is already more than his pedigree. As his movies get bigger, he has to ensure he remains an actor, not a profit centre, a student of cinema, not a bland toy boy.
