SSR Obsession Syndrome#25- Intezaar Ek Jhalak Ka - Page 10

On Mukesh Chhabra's Facebook page, a typical post reads like this: "Hello Sir I m a uttranchali and a theatre artist in bhopal is there is any audition where I fit pls text me." On his website, though, the messages are of a different kind. Imitiaz Ali, for instance, has written: "It is because of him that casting is a serious department in Hindi movies today." Bridging the gap between the former and the latter is what Chhabra, one of Bollywood's top casting directors, does for a living.

A lot has changed since Chhabra took up the profession. In fact, one of the reasons he took up casting was when he realised that "this was the only job which people were not taking seriously". "When I worked in theatre, I used to meet a lot of actors who were looking for the right break, but the filmmakers were not aware of how to reach them," he said, over the phone from Mumbai. He started helping filmmakers on Delhi shoots; notably Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra on Rang De Basanti. In 2008, he headed out to Mumbai.

Though he'd been working on small casting assignments for three years, his big break came when Ranjit Kapoor, who knew Chhabra from his theatre days in Delhi, asked him to cast the comedy Chintu Ji. Chhabra surrounded Rishi Kapoor with new faces in that film - a strategy which has served him well over the years. Though Chintu Ji took a while to release, industry folk ended up seeing rough cuts. It led to assignments like Imtiaz Ali's Love Aaj Kal. He was also rewarded for treating the casting of Chillar Party, a kids' film, with seriousness. Anurag Kashyap saw the film, liked Chhabra's work, and brought him in to cast the umpteen parts in Gangs of Wasseypur.

Chhabra singles out his casting of director Tigmanshu Dhulia as Ramadhir Singh in Kashyap's film as one of his prouder moments. (He also takes credit for the casting of then-TV actor Sushant Singh Rajput as one of the leads inKai Po Che!) To these, one might add the inspired choices of Vinod Nagpal from Hum Log as the patriarch in Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, or the timid-looking Harish Khanna as the silent assassin in Gangs of Wasseypur. His work can be seen in another Kashyap film, the soon-to-be-released kidnapping thriller Ugly. He is also responsible for Hansal Mehta's long-delayed Shahid, starring Raj Kumar, whom Chhabra has cast five times now.

Chhabra described casting as a "long, long, long process". "The director finishes the script and calls me," he explained. "I am the first person who comes aboard - before the cinematographer, before the production designer. I read the script, go back, make my notes. I meet the director, he gives me his brief on characterisation. I start finding options, shortlisting actors. If I like them, I do a set of auditions, again I show the director. Then I audition actors in a group. If the director likes it, then I send the list to production, and they lock the dates and money." The entire process usually takes two months, he said, though it can take up to eight or nine months on a large film like Rajkumar Hirani's next, Peekay.

Chhabra's outlook makes him a good fit with the kind of cinema that's sprouted up around Bollywood's fringes in the recent past. When he became a casting director, he promised himself he would only work on films where his ideas would actually make a difference. He's tried to stick to that as far as possible, judging potential projects on the strength of their scripts, and not worrying whether the budget is '30 lakh or ten crore. "Who wants to say no to Raju Hirani if you're getting a film like Peekay?" he said. "Who wants to say no to Imtiaz Ali and Highway? I did Bombay Velvet with Anurag [Kashyap], which had a budget of 90 crore. But I also did Siddharth, which is a very small film. I liked the script and I did it."

Though you'd think the nine films that he's working on would keep him busy enough, Chhabra also finds time to conduct daily workshops with budding actors. He said that this was an extension of his work with Theatre In Education (an offshoot of the National School of Drama) in Delhi. Perhaps it's also a way of reminding himself where he came from and how far he's progressed. "People are respecting us, giving us money, opening credits," he said of the casting profession today. "I keep checking myself, saying, dude, stay like this."