Been There,Done That

Umberto’s failure didn’t discourage Gupte. His next was Ketan Mehta’s Holi in 1984,an adaptation of Mahesh Elkunchwar’s play by the same name. He auditioned for the movie with his friends from Mahendra Joshi’s theatre group,Ashutosh Gowarikar,Aamir Khan,Neeraj Vohra and Raj Zutshi. “Interestingly,all of us got selected,but Aamir and I had no characters allotted to us. One day,Ketan announced that he needed someone to play a guy whose towel is snatched by a friend in a hostel bathroom and who chases him down the stairs,naked. Everyone chickened out but I,recognising it as my one last chance,volunteered. Eventually,due to censor rules,I did the scene in my undergarments and Aamir ended up as the guy who snatched my towel. But I had made my way into the film and finally helped Ketan in other departments too. And from a nobody I managed to get my name in the top six on the credit rolls,” he grins.

The big break,however,never came his way and,as Gupte says,he never really tried. So while we eagerly wait to see him as Sunil “Chopper” Bhope in Kaminey,the 42-year-old is already busy with his own movie,Sapno Ko Ginte Ginte,which is at the fag end of the scripting stage. “I did Kaminey chiefly to further the cause I work for,” says Gupte,who has been associated with underprivileged children through Aseem,an NGO,through which he conducts theatre and cinema workshops.

Interestingly,his work with children is the one constant through the years in which he experimented with theatre,art,screenwriting and filmmaking. “My experiment with theatre ended with Joshi’s demise and I stopped selling art when I realised that my art (glimpses of which we saw in Taare Zameen Par as Ishaan’s work) looks really stupid and selfish in front of the various folk arts of our country,” he says,pointing towards some of his artwork that hangs on the walls of his office. “My flirtation with screenwriting for commercial cinema,too,has been merely to remain afloat.”

A non-conformist of sorts,this multifaceted man continues to sit on the periphery of all these. An escapist? “Maybe,but the truth is that I wouldn’t like to stick to the norms and limit myself. A rolling stone gathers no moss,and that’s how I’d like to be all my life.”