I was always a back-bencher: Irrfan Khan

The sight of actor Irrfan Khan interacting with children in Delhi is a heart-warming one. Bending down, he asks a little girl, “What’s your favourite sport?”

The answer, cricket, makes him smile and he asks her a few more questions, even as a bunch of other children huddle around to question him. The event, organised by P&G as part of its Shiksha initiative, allowed him to visit a school in Delhi and interact with its students and staff.

“This is taking me back to my own school days,” he says  later as he settles down to catch a breath. “I thought I was dreaming as I rode into this place — the bare field, the locality, the people…the fact that they’re living in a place like this and sustaining a school for their children is really heartening. When I was in school, I would be traveling for hours to and from my classes and hated the fact that it left me with next to no time for games!” he adds with a chuckle.

Remembering more, he shares, “Looking back, I now realise that one’s education truly begins when what one is studying begins to interest one. The point is how much you evolve as an individual and that can only happen if you take interest in a subject. That was how it was, for example, with me and maths, that universally despised subject. I used to hate it and then when I began to understand it and take interest in it, I began to love it!”

Ask him how he leapt from there to acting and he says, “I was perfectly aware that if I continued into a purely academic discipline, I would have gotten thoroughly bored. That’s why I chose cinema and the National School of Drama took me forward from there.”

At the moment, the actor is readying for his upcoming release Piku, where he dons the garb of a romantic lead – something he admits he has wanted to do for a long time. “Since the time I first wanted to become an actor, playing a romantic hero has been on my mind,” he says.

He also recently completed a set of workshops with the team of his upcoming Hollywood project Inferno, led by director Ron Howard and actor Tom Hanks. “We did workshops, look tests, script readings, styling and more. I’m really looking forward to working with all of them now,” he concludes.