MUMBAI: The Delhi-born 27 year-old lad has done theater since he was in the fifth standard in school. The son of parents who are graphic designers and writers, he took off to Montreal for a course in cinema (including directing and writing) and landed in Mumbai in 2008. Seven years later, his debut film “Titli” will release soon after being a global release in 2014 and winning global acclaim. Shashank Arora plays the flighty “Titli” in the film, and his nickname within the film means a butterfly.
A multifaceted talent, Arora is also a musician who plays the flute and the ukulele, sings, and has been writing screenplays. He assisted casting director Syed Lateef, who has worked on “Fast & Furious,” “The Lunchbox” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” for a year and a half, and met Kanu Behl, his first director, through a friend.
“Then I started an arduous audition of sorts for 18 months, and I knew that Kanu was making a film produced by Dibakar Banerjee and Yash Raj Films. The process began in Mumbai for two months and continued in Delhi, where I visited all the places connected with my character Titli, including the slums,” recalls Arora.
“The process was quite traumatizing, as I stayed in Sangam Vihar, the largest concrete slum in India,” the actor goes on. “A 1.2 million population has just 120 cops to look after their safety. I stayed and slept in a place where there was no water or electricity, and I had to dive into my life to understand my character, and know from what and whom I had to escape.”
Back in Mumbai, casting director Atul Mongia even beat him up (“with my consent!”) to make him feel Titli’s plight as the youngest brother in a violent family of car-jackers.
“I was not pampered as a kid, but my family had never beat me, and, when sir came to know this, he thought that I should go through the experience to feel the pain and emotions!” says the actor.
Arora admits that he was never sure that he would still get to do the film after all this. In Delhi, he was surrounded by art, as he and his family knew Indian Ocean and Shubha Mudgal, but he had no contacts whatsoever in Mumbai.
“But I had been told by my acting teacher that good actors always got jobs, so I was never really worried. In fact, if my work was real enough, he told me that I could do any role in the world,” he says.
The actor is among those who believe in training, “just like musicians or doctors.” He feels that an instinctive actor is one in a million. Additional influences include his father being a part of Safdar Hashmi’s group Sehmat.
“That sort of exposure grounds me and adds to the realism,” he smiles. “I am almost a leftist and activist, and I plan to direct a film one day. And my stories will affect Indian politics!” he claims.
For an actor with unconventional looks, he is not doing too badly either. Coming up for him is a key role in Farhan Akhtar’s “Rock On!! 2”; an Anil Kapoor film that is an adaptation of the 1969 Amitabh Bachchan debut “Saat Hindustani,” morphed into a tale of five Indians in Chicago; and the title role in Kaushik Mukherjee’s “Naman.”