Rangrasiya aired on Colors from December 2013 to September 2014. It started off as a Nautanki Films production, as a joint venture of Abhinav Shukla and Saurabh Tiwari. During early days, producer Saurabh Tiwari branched off into his own production house, Tequila Shots Productions and took over the making of Rangrasiya. Rangrasiya is a love story of many dimensions. Of soulmates. Of passion. Of conflict. It is the story of a simple village girl, Paro, and a BSD officer, Rudra. Paro is thrown in extreme circumstances literally into the hands of this dangerous, patriotic, BSD officer with a dark side to him.
Ashish played the role of Major Rudra Pratap Ranawat, the brave, reckless (badass!) BSD officer. He prepared for months for this role, both physically and emotionally, going deep into the psyche of the character. From working out, growing a moustache and staring out the window in silence for hours (psyching his wife out) he crafted the persona, the quirks, the personal signature of Major Saab. In doing so, he swept the population off its collective feet. He said in an interview that he loved everything about Rudra, because he created him. A classic example of bringing a character in a script to life, to larger than life. Rudra was a career defining role for Ashish, moving him definitively into the big league. His moniker, "Major Saab" became famous nation-wide, with women like Madhuri Dixit and men like Emran Hashmi referring to him by that appellation. ๐ Ashish and his heroine, the incredibly beautiful and talented Sanaya Irani, raised the level and the meaning of "Hot Jodi" to a whole different hashtag! #HotJodi ๐ณ. Sanaya Irani played Paro, the simple village girl with a touch of the mystic. She was the yin to Ashish's yang!
On a purely trivial level, Ashish, who has always been handsome, never looked more dashing and just sizzling HOT on screen. The Major in his BSD uniform, phatphatiya and aviators made a lot of dils go dhak dhak!
Nonetheless, looks are not everything. Ashish portrayed a mindboggling spectrum of emotions, using the vehicle of powerful monologues in some scenes and eloquent silences where his eyes spoke volumes in others, providing the living, breathing counterpoint for his co-actors as they enacted those scenes. He breathed life into Rudra and that is why he won the hearts of all those who followed Rangrasiya.
On the IF forum, Rangrasiya was the hot topic, maintaining its #1 ranking for most of the nine months that it aired. It is a testimony to the story and potential of Rangrasiya and how hot the jodi of Sanish and Parud was.
He won ITAA great performer of the year award on November 1st 2014.
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From June through September of 2014, Colors TV aired JDJ 7. Judged by the (in)famous panel of Madhuri Dixit, Remo D'Souza and Karan Johar, hosted by the hilarious Manish Paul and Ranveer Shorey, the weekends were festivals of talent, mirth and masti. Ashish participated in JDJ and ... wait for it ... HE WON THE TROPHY! โญ๏ธ
In this incredible journey of how a non-dancer who has not trained professionally becomes a dancer, he tried all flavors of dance, taught ably by Shampa Sonthalia, the ONLY choreographer who has won Jhalak TWICE, indisputably the reigning Queen of Jhalak Dikhla Jaa. From Yakshagana (ancient dance form from Karnataka) to paso doble, to the hot samba, to hip-hop and many more, Ashish pushed the frontiers on form and performance and danced his way into his fans hearts. Fans would spend all night voting for him and he never ended in the dreaded bottom two of the contestant pile. ๐ณ
It is a fact that in Jhalak, the format of the show is such that fan votes are highly influential in deciding who wins. Ashish never forgot this. He not only brought through what was going on in Rangrasiya in many of his performances, he also connected with his fans over Twitter, displaying great senstivity to their moods as the story of Rangrasiya took a shocking turn with Paro "dying". As he reached out and connected, his fan following went from 10K to 20K on Twitter in a few weeks. Although other contestants seemed to have more followers on social media, Ashish's fans - thats us folks! - catapulted him to the top spot. He dedicated his trophy to us - his return gift for our love as he described it!โค๏ธ
Who will forget the dance item where he portrayed Rudra fighting for the flag! He was incredibly sick - and as he related later in an interview - he could not even remember what he did. He was so sick, he was ready to give up. As he later related, Archana, his wife and rock of support showed him the tweets and messages from fans and he pushed himself out on stage delivering a thunderous performance with his awesome hiphop group. Even Fawad Khan approved!๐
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