i will be able to play her and she is constantly with me we were rehearsing her signature poem ajj akhaan waaris shah nu about what she wrote about the postpartition trauma it was an emotional experience for me and i broke down while performing it i guess i desired too much to play amrita pritam in my life when you desire something too much i guess it happenstalk about shekhar playing sahir ludhianvi its so uncanny that when i took to writing poetry i wanted to write in urdu and my favourite three authors were sahir ludhianvi ghalib and faiz ahmed faiz i felt that only shekhar can play sahir as you need to be able to recite and have the correct lehza and pronunciation and command over urdu that he hasconversation with shekhar sumanwhat does it mean for you to be portraying sahir ludhianvi on stage i have myriad reasons for doing this play i started my career as a theatre actor in a repertoire company and have always been drawn to literature also i have always been a rebel who has always been an antiestablishment guy and find similarities between sahir and me as he too was a rebel he was nomadic a maverick and i find myself within me the same sentiments being echoed he was my favourite even as a kid when i did not even have a hang of urdu but someone presented me his book parchhaiyan i knew reading it that it was something very beautiful and it was my prized possession till i lost it somewhere in the middle while moving from delhi to mumbai and then within mumbai moving so many houses i asked so many people but could not find a copy of it recently saif our director got me a cheap edition of it from old delhi but that has so many errors that i landed up making corrections in it i jumped at the idea of playing sahir as the whole world is in love with sahir just as i have been i love the urdu tehzeeb and zabaan that is redundant and sunk in oblivion now i admire and love him for the fact that he was a jilted lover every boy who is growing up wants to be a devdas and wants to be a jilted lover other than the fact that sahir was commitmentphobic while i am not i find a lot of similarity between me and him also to be able to work with deepti who is one of the finest actresses and coming to theatre with this is fantastic i also feel that theatre needs to be promoted as the emphasis on language is just not happening and less and less of good theatre is being made today also the satisfaction of performing live on stage and that too playing sahir is one of my strong dreams that has come true thanks to deepti who recommended my name i started meeting people who