Shridhar Raghavan is excited to meet us. The writer of Pathaan, last week’s release that has broken all box office records, pre and post-pandemic, started his writing career as a humour columnist with mid-day in the 1990s. He even named the iconic protagonist in crime television show CID after a senior journalist he worked with at mid-day. These days, he is enjoying the love that the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer is amassing. “I am glad the audiences connected with the film,” he says excitedly. More than a connection, which may be hard to feel as the movie is about Indian and Pakistani spies trying to stop a major catastrophe and save the country, we think the film has resonated because it did what every film should: entertain. Raghav’s script is tight, fast-paced, and represents the best of Bollywood potboilers. His characters—whether the charismatic Pathaan played smoothly by Khan; the sardonic, articulate villain called Jim, essayed by John Abraham or the sexy female sidekick, a role that perhaps only Deepika Padukone could have done justice to—are well etched out and get the job done.

“First, I am a reader,” Raghavan clarifies. He needn’t have. We have spent the first 25 minutes of the interview discussing books. Japanese author Keigo Higashino, famous for The Devotion of Suspect X, comes up in our chat. We get it; he is enamoured by the genre, whether spy, mystery or pure crime. “I reported on crime as a journalist. It taught me a thing or two about being on time with deadlines,” he says. Like his filmmaker brother Sriram Raghavan (Johnny Gaddaar), Shridhar too grew up on a steady diet of movies, both English and Hindi. “I lived in Pune, practically between two cinema halls—Apollo and Alankar. One screened English films, old and new, and the other, Hindi. You name it, I saw it. All of Sergio Leone’s works, Alfred Hitchcock, Manmohan Desai, Vijay Anand...” In the 80s, he moved to London with his father, and since racism was rife, he spent more time at home, in front of the television. “It showed reruns of movies and shows. It became my comfort zone.”