At mid-day’s special Independence Day chat with ‘Saare Jahan Se Accha’ cast, Pratik Gandhi says Bollywood’s larger-than-life spies go against espionage’s ground rule of blending in
(From left) Actors Suhail Nayyar, Kritika Kamra, Anup Soni, Sunny Hinduja, and Pratik Gandhi at the special chat moderated by mid-day’s Priyanka Sharma, at St Xavier’s College in Mumbai. Pics/Kirti Surve Parade
To celebrate India’s 79th Independence Day on Friday, mid-day and Netflix India brought a slice of the country’s past to St Xavier’s College in Mumbai. The auditorium was packed with eager students, their eyes glued to the stage, where the cast of Saare Jahan Se Accha — a spy thriller inspired by real-life events of the 1970s — sat down for a chat with mid-day. '
Pratik Gandhi and Sunny Hinduja
The show — starring Pratik Gandhi, Sunny Hinduja, Kritika Kamra, Anup Soni, and Suhail Nayyar — dropped online only a day before Hrithik Roshan and Jr NTR’s ambitious spy offering War 2 opened in cinemas.
Suhail Nayyar, Kritika Kamra, and Anup Soni share a laugh
Pointing out that the series and the YRF spy films hail from dramatically different worlds, we posed a hypothetical scenario to Gandhi: What would Vishnu Shankar, his intelligence officer character in the show, chat about with Roshan’s Kabir Dhaliwal, Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan, and Salman Khan’s Tiger if they crossed paths? “I don’t think I’ll recruit them ever. I’ll ask them to join the entertainment industry,” he quipped, eliciting uproarious laughter from the audience.
The cast with the students
Gandhi had his reason for the choice. When we mentioned that the treatment of spies and their lives in Saare Jahan Se Accha is gritty and real, a marked difference from that in films, the actor elaborated, “War 2 and all those films talk about wars. The heroes are fighting the wars, whereas real-life spies’ job is to avoid wars.” The actor pointed out another difference — the agents on the big screen look too dashing for their own good. “These agents are not supposed to look like heroes, because then they will [draw] attention. They should be able to blend in. If they can do any kind of stunts, I guess the world will know that this guy is up to something,” he said.
Given the occasion, we asked the actors what freedom means to them. Kamra said, “Freedom is the ability to dissent. You are truly free with someone, or as a citizen, if you can speak your mind fearlessly.” Soni added, “If we can hug each other, say what we want, eat whatever we want, that’s freedom.”
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