annu kapoor 58 may have dropped out of school after class x but he is extremely wellread and agnostic after having read the vedas the upanishads and even the quran as many as 14 times he is emotional loyal and aware and feels strongly for his family society and country over an hourlong conversation with bombay times ahead of his upcoming film the shaukeens he talks to bombay times about his beginnings as a nautankiwala his big regret in life and why he would never cheat his wife anupama excerpts also read it was painful to see my sister suffer annu kapoorhow did you come into films i was born in bhopal my father was a punjabi and my mother a bengali brahmin my father originally comes from peshawar pakistan and motivated her to learn urdu persian and arabic and ultimately she became a teacher of urdu and retired like that at that time the punjabis would write in urdu be it prem chopra sahab dharmendra or gulzar sahab my grandfather dr kripa ram kapoor was a doctor in the british army and my late great grandfather lala ganga ram kapoor was hanged by the british government as he was a revolutionary my maternal grandfather served the state of tikamgarh as the pradhan a friend of my father made him get into the glamour world by getting him to invest 25000 that was very big money in 1947 and he started a folk theatre company even though he otherwise had no connection in theatre we were seen as nautankiwalas and our family was ostracised and people looked down upon us my dadi chucked him out of the house so my mother always tried to keep all her four children away from theatre art or culture hence i wanted to become a surgeon or an ias but never an actor due to our financial crisis i had to quit studying after class x the social ostracisation that we had to go through was not a good feeling there was no stability of income no thikana about roti there and a lot of uncertainty about life we kept shifting from one place to another place living the life of a gypsy my mothers salary was just 40 she had just two saris in which she would travel 13 kms walking to and fro from school to teach and earn her salary life was very tough i then ran a tea stall sold churan ke note for a while ran a fire cracker shop with just 42 post which i started selling lottery tickets when my babuji said if there is nothing else happening join my company and i joined his theatre company my mother cried a lot and perhaps i also felt sad for myself but i started doing theatre every night it was not amateur theatre but was hard core professional theatre if you didnt perform on a particular night people would not come and if they didnt come there would