This young writer is a chronicler of the real. Much of Sahni’s writings, from Company to Bunty Aur Babli, Khosla Ka Ghosla to Chak De, captures a changing India and its different modes of being. A single-column article in the sports pages of a newspaper on the win of the women’s hockey team in the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester may have set him off on the Chak De trail but it’s not just the neglect of hockey that he takes up. Chak De is as much about hockey as it is about being a Muslim in India, about young spirits smashing the gender divide. Last year’s hit Khosla Ka Ghosla took up the urban middle-class dream of owning a plot of land and the nightmare of losing it. Bunty Aur Babli was about small-town India, impatient to get ahead.

On this slim body of work rests his reputation as Bollywood’s next big writer. In his mid-30s, Sahni is seen to be part of the new breed of scriptwriters, which includes Vishal Bhardwaj and Rajkumar Hirani, that has got good writing back in films. “In a short span, he has done films that are poles apart. That shows his range as a writer,” says noted writer-lyricist Javed Akhtar. That also shows, adds Akhtar, that Sahni’s canvas is not being influenced by the success of his films. “It’s easy to repeat yourself if your last film was a success. But he didn’t do another Bunty Aur Babli.” Some would say the variety that Sahni has brought in is a part of a growing willingness in the industry to explore new themes. Akhtar agrees. “The kind of films we are making now is something we weren’t doing earlier. I consider the period between 1983 and 1993 as the darkest for Indian films. Now there is a greater desire to do original films though it’ll take some time to reach the maturity of the golden era, the sort that Bimal Roy and Mehboob achieved,” says Akhtar. 

... contd.