Since then, Sahni has been working on diverse subjects, drawing on his experience and interpreting the world around him. For Chak De, he was at hockey camps across the country, talking to players and picking up nuggets of their lives. In the end, he had a fat file on the game. ‘‘I thought if the players and coach knew that I was researching for a film, it might alter their behaviour. But I revealed the truth to a few of them on the last day.’’

Delhi was where Sahni was born and grew up. With a civil servant father and a teacher mother, books, and not films, made up the world of his childhood. Holidays for Sahni, who studied in Delhi at the Kendriya Vidyalaya on IIT campus till his Class X and then at DPS RK Puram, meant reading. ‘‘I was never into films. I used to find ads more entertaining. My brother and I would tape Chitrahaars and ads. When I came to Mumbai to write, I must have seen only 30-odd films,’’ says Sahni.

From his Delhi experience and a family incident grew the story of last year’s surprise hit: Khosla Ka Ghosla. The story of a middle-class family who invests everything in a plot in south Delhi only to lose it to the land mafia and how it wins it back had a life-next-door feel to it that recalled the best of Sai Paranjape’s work in the 80s. (Sahni counts Paranjape’s Chashme Buddoor and Katha among the films that had a major influence on him.) ‘‘The plot was taken from what happened to my aunt. The bits about the mafia building a wall around their plot and the Khosla family hiring pehalwans to evict them were true. But the latter part about how they win their plot back was all fantasy. In real life, it didn’t end well,’’ says Sahni, who wrote the lyrics and also turned creative producer for the film. The authenticity was once again the result of research—Sahni sent out his team to meet and secretly record conversations with property dealers in Gurgaon.

... contd.