He played the young Lucky in Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye with spunk but off screen Manjot Singh is just another teenager nervous about his board exams

The story goes that the casting director of Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye, rejected Manjot Singh for the role of the boy who grows up to be master thief Lucky. As we meet the actor in his home in east Delhi’s Hargobind Enclave, we feel a pang of sympathy for the bloke who got it so wrong. For, it has to be said, the 16-year-old in front of us is nothing like the street-smart kid in Banerjee’s film. There’s none of the sass that crackled on screen in his scenes with Paresh Rawal. He’s just another teenager, a little worried about his class X board exams next month. He smiles shyly, darting swift looks at his mother sitting across from him on the sofa as he answers questions, and blushes pink when we ask him if he has a girlfriend.

So how did he land up on screen? Manjot’s father, a businessman, got to know that Banerjee and his team were in Delhi scouting for actors and asked his son if he wanted to try it out. “So I went to Saket for an audition thought I had never acted before, even in school plays,” Manjot says. When we prod him about what he had to do at the audition, he mumbles, “Bas kuch lines bolni thi.” Mother Darshan Kaur intervenes matter-of-factly. “They asked you to propose someone, didn’t they?” she says, before adding apologetically, “He is very shy.”

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