JOIN US“A happy woman is a myth”. So he said and, contrary to expectations, women aren’t chasing him with spindles and swords. They are running after him nonetheless. Meet Kartik Aaryan. Yes, he is the guy who has taken social media by storm with his monologues on the women species and what makes them happy or rather doesn’t.
“More than romantic messages, I keep getting queries from women about how they can get their relationships back on track. I am quite stunned. Of all things, being a love guru was not something I expected as a side-effect of Pyaar Ka Punchnama. At least, not for women,” says the 20-something from Gwalior who winged it to Mumbai under the pretext of joining an engineering college here and started pursuing his passion, Bollywood, instead.
Shattering myths
Monologues and Kartik seem to go hand-in-hand. The actor made his debut in director Luv Ranjan’s unexpected hit Pyaar Ka Punchnama in 2011. His monologue, a tirade against demanding women in the film, became an instant hit and a USP of the franchise. When the second instalment came along a few months ago, the audience was already expecting an encore and the writers, including Tarun Jain and Rahul Mody, besides the director, had penned quite a voluminous one. “They gave me 12 pages to memorise; it lasted 12 minutes and took several sleepless nights to master. When I did crib about memorising that much, they told me to thank my stars as they had initially written 25 pages. I DID thank my stars,” he confesses. In case you were wondering, the scene that was edited down to six minutes 45 seconds, was shot at one go with about six-seven retakes.
Kartik says he improvised a few lines while shooting the scene but most of it was what the writers had set for him. “Sometimes when you are in the flow, you tend to change words to make sure they roll off your tongue well. That’s what I did,” he says, adding that the most ‘touching’ part of the monologue for him was the line, ‘inko baat karni hoti hai…har baar’ (women need to talk every single time). “I have no idea why or what do they want to talk about but this is one problem area which I have personally faced several times. Let the man be happy, I mean. He doesn’t want to speak. Fine!” he adds, threatening to break into yet another monologue.
Inspirations & more
The boy has grown up watching Nana Patekar’s monologues but expecting these to help him in his own career would’ve been a remote possibility. “For my auditions for the first Pyaar Ka Punchnama, I was asked to enact Nana Patekar’s monologues and Aamir Khan’s emotional scene from Rang De Basanti. Those were the ones that got me the job. In fact, even then I was handed over a four-page monologue just a day prior to the final audition,” he laughs.
Kartik has a good sense of humour and it seems to have been handed down to him by his mother. When she saw the movie and the final scene which ends with the boys confessing that there is no love like their mother’s love, she mockingly told her son, “You’ve mentioned me in your film; you should’ve even put my picture in that shot.”
Kartik is soon to make his next career announcement and is hoping that the third instalment of Pyaar Ka Punchnama goes on floors soon. No prizes for guessing why this boy is still single! “And happy”, he laughs and signs off.