Theatre is Imran Zahid’s passion

Imran Zahid, who’s doing a film with Mahesh Bhatt, gets nostalgic about DU and Delhi.
Imran Zahid, who’s playing slain JNU leader Chandu in a Mahesh Bhatt film, came to Delhi in 1996. “I came to Delhi’s North Campus when the admissions were almost over, and “Sarfarosh” was being shot there. I wanted something like that – the laid-back college life, no cell phone, no internet,” he says.
If he’d listened to his dad, though, none of that would have happened.“My dad got me admitted to an engineering college in Maharashtra, but those formulae were not for me. But you know in small towns, like in Bokaro, if you’re not studying science, then people think that you cannot do anything in life. But I told him that this wasn’t what I wanted to do, and that I wanted to go to Dilli. After graduation, I had decided that main naukri nahi karunga, and that I will never go to Bombay to ask anyone for roles,” he says.
Theatre is Imran’s passion, and he was with Arvind Gaur’s theatre group as well. But talk of DU, and he gets nostalgic. “College life is staying awake the whole night, and then in place of breakfast, having lunch. Guys used to go to Daulat Ram and Miranda House to check out girls, or just roam around the city,” he laughs.
So where did this DU boy meet Mahesh Bhatt? “I met him at an event in Dubai in 2007, where I had gone to pick him up at the airport. The moment he got out of the airport and I introduced myself, the first thing he said was, ‘Tu hero lagta hai, why don’t you act?’ That bond matured over time. He messaged me once, and I still have it saved – it says, ‘Dil thaam ke baitho, tumhare liye ek role hai,’” he says. And that’s how his Bollywood journey started.
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