 Raju, you are one of the activist directors in Bollywood where nobody knows you are really an activist. Your first thoughts of activism, etc. Where do they come from? I would think it's genetic. My dad, the time we were growing up, I've always seen him fight. If you look at actually, a lot of my films had some scenes from his life. You usually end up picking up, you can pick up from a DVD or from a book or pick up from life. So a lot of scenes I picked up were from my father's life. If you would remember Munawai MBBS, there was this scene where Sunil, his pocket is picked. And he catches the thief and the whole crowd wants to hit him. And he says, no, let him go. Maybe he's got a problem. He saves him. This happened with my dad. I was a young kid, I remember. And somebody came to his office, was a Sindhi gentleman. And dad thought, okay, same community. And he needed 2,000 bucks. He said, I've come to the city for some work. I've lost that money. Can you help me with 2,000 bucks? He gave it to him. Evening when we were sitting at home, we had a few guests. And somebody else told my dad that somebody came to his office and took 2,000 bucks from him. So he figured out that this guy was really going around and picking up money and making different stories. So he realized he'd been caught. The rest of the guys gave up, but my dad woke up at 6 in the morning. There used to be very few hotels. There were lodges, one hotel. He went to every hotel, every lodge to find him. And he actually found him at 7 o'clock at one hotel, got him, brought him home and asked him, why did you cheat me? But then he didn't know what to do with him. He didn't want to take him to a cop station. So he took him to, there used to be this one. We were in a small town, there used to be a Sindhi Panchayat. He said, let me take him. He's from our community, so let him take him there and let them figure out what to do. So when he took him to that Panchayat, there were these bunch of people who were sitting like judges there and I was there with my dad. He told them, this guy has conned me of 2,000 rupees. Now what do I do with him? I don't think he'd give it to me, but I still don't know what to do with him. So one guy got up and started hitting him. So my dad told him, he stopped him. He said, look, I can also hit him. But I don't want to hit him. I want to figure out some way of solving this issue. So that guy said, leave it, leave it to me. I really want to bash him and he started still hitting him. So my dad got very annoyed and this has stayed with me. He got up and he saved the thief and he said, look at all these guys who are sitting here in judgement today. They're actually all thieves. Somebody is stealing from the income tax. Somebody is stealing from the insurance company. Somebody is diffusing somebody else in business. If you want to be a thief, be a thief like them. Don't steal these 2,000 bucks. And he took him to the railway station, bought him a ticket, put him on the train to Raipur and let him go. So I guess I grew up watching these kind of things. So somewhere all this reflects in the film where you want to say these kind of things. So to continue on your father, your father had an amazing habit of curing you of any fears that you have or maybe not fears but anything you believed or so. So tell us a story of what your father did to you. I think I was in my fourth standard or fifth standard when I was very impressionable age when I would sit with friends and you would hear these ghost stories. So one day I came back home and was talking about how ghosts exist. And my dad told me, son there are no ghosts. I said, no, no, they do exist. He said, then show me where are they? I was a little fox because I'd heard that story and I'd not seen one. So I told him, you know, maybe you don't see them in cities. You have to really go out in the villages and then you'll spot them. So he used to have this little old Vauxhall car and he put me in the car at, I think, 9.30 in the night. He drove me down to the small city. You had to just drive for 15 minutes and you were out of the city. On the highway, completely dark, he stopped the car. He says, okay, now we're in a small village. Let's see if there are ghosts around. And he started yelling. And I was sitting in the back seat really scared. He started, hey, ghosts, anybody, booth, either, who are you? And obviously nobody came. But that did leave an impression with me. The next day I went and fought with my friend and I have no ghosts. You know what bullshit you're telling me. So I guess when you grow up with these kind of things, they stay with you. So now let's think of how they translate into your movies. You know, you said that when you made Munna Bhai. Because you wanted to make some statement about the medical community, but you wanted to do it in a fun way. But you didn't start quite that way. When you were angry, you were really angry. But tell us your journey of how your anger turned into something. You know, I was a terrible student. I did science till 12th. So most of my friends went into a medical school or engineering school. I didn't have marks enough to get into any of them. So I had to even really struggle to get into a commerce school. College hours would be just three hours in the morning. The whole day I had to myself. So I would go and spend time with my friends in medical schools. I would stay with them in the hostel. And I saw amazing things in that space. And I was thinking that I'm doing commerce. I'm supposed to do something. I'm supposed to do business. I'm supposed to make money. And doctors are here compassionately to serve people. But what I saw there was very funny. I thought that nobody was really wanting to serve people. Even my friends would stand and, you know, when you're in your second, third year, they would watch people go and say, okay, let's analyze what disease this guy has got. They'll see a fat guy and say, okay, high cholesterol. I think in three years he'll give us a Maruti car. We'll have it, you know. So everywhere I was seeing, and there were some episodes where a lot of my family members realized, spent time in the hospital. And I saw... I actually don't want to criticize them, but I saw some kind of a lot of corrupt practices there. So there was a little anger with the medical community. So my first film when I wrote, you all have seen the film on our MVBS, it was a completely different script. It was a script about a gangster who wakes up one morning with a headache and goes to a physician who sends him to an ophthalmologist who checks his eyes and sends him for an MRI, who sends him somewhere else, who sends him somewhere else. Next day, this guy gets okay anyway. I think it was a hangover. And he realizes, but it wasn't a hangover, how many guys made money? So he wants to become a doctor. This guy decides, he says, I'll go into medical school and become a doctor because they not only make money like I do, I also make money, but what I don't have is respect, and these guys have respect. So I wrote a very hard-hitting film which was against doctors, but then I realized maybe I'm being too... I shouldn't do that. There are plenty of good doctors who I've seen. In fact, I remember funny story. The first month I moved, the time I moved to Bombay, the first month I fell ill and I had some fever and I knew nobody in the city. So in Andheri, I just spotted a name of this doctor and I walked into his clinic. I still laugh. I feel like laughing. I see his face. Poor guy was sitting there and used to have a register. I sat in front of him and he asked me, what's wrong with me? I said, I've got a little fever. So he opened his register and there were three columns I remember. Column one was symptom. Column two was medicine. And the column three was amount. So as I said, fever, he wrote okay, fever, 10 bucks. Then I said, I've got a little congestion here. Okay, congestion of throat, some medicine, 10 bucks. So as I kept on giving my symptoms, I could see the amount increasing. But then I looked at his face and poor guy looked so troubled and so ill. So I actually gave him some extra symptoms. I said, I've got this. So somewhere I said to me, not all doctors are as bad. Basically, of course we spoke about how doctors should be compassionate towards the patient. And if you're not, you shouldn't be a doctor. But see, people go to a film. Finally, nobody wants to be preached. You go to a cinema hall to be entertained. So whatever your packaging or whatever you're trying to say, if you can package in a way which is entertaining, I guess more people would like to watch it. So was it easy for you to sell that idea initially? You know, when you started, you're not Rajahirani now. So how easy or difficult was it to get that bar first? The idea of what? See, actually for me it was very easy, I thought. Though I've been in Bombay, I took 15 years to become a first film since I moved to Bombay. I was doing other things. I was doing advertising. I was editing for a period of time. But somewhere I believed that if I have a good script, people would buy it. And this is the first script I wrote and the first person I took to was ready to make that film. Of course I struggled with finding an actor for it for a long time, but I did get a producer very easily. So one of the central things about a movie is characters. So what was your inspiration behind the character circuit? Which became kind of viral and fun and everybody loves... It's one of the few side characters that's become as much attention as the main character. The difference between when you write a book versus when you write a screenplay, there are two very different kind of writings. In a book you can say something very easily. You can say, Lakshmi is sitting here and thinking of something. And what she's thinking you can actually define. But in cinema you need to show it. So it's like, I think Watson was created for Sherlock Holmes to tell the audience that how did he solve this problem? So circuit actually was created to show the virtues of Munna Bhai. That Munna Bhai is a great guy. So he needed a padding. So whatever Munna Bhai does, he has to speak to a person. But he's actually not speaking to a circuit, he's speaking to the audience. He can't really talk to the audience in a cinema hall. So he speaks to a character and you come to know what Munna Bhai is thinking. So circuit was created for that. But as we were writing, he started turning on to be a very funny character. So when you write, you start describing a character of faith in Munna Bhai. He will do anything. Munna Bhai tells him to pick up a gun and shoot. Somebody won't question. He'll pick up the gun and shoot. So blind faith. So talking about movies, let's talk about your latest movie, PK. And how long has it been since you started the script of this? About a year and a half? Two years? This film has been a difficult one to write. It took a very long. Some scripts do get written quickly. This one was a tough one to write. So it took almost two, three years. Three years I would say to write. We still keep changing things. To figure out what clothes PK would wear, they just went around finding people who they thought wore similar clothes and got the clothes off of them and gave them money. So most of the clothes he wore were said somebody else's. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you.