What made you accept an unusual film like Pink because we have never seem you act in specific issue-based films before, specially those related to women.

I did not know the script, I did not know anything about the role I was to play, I also had no clue whether I would act in it at all or not. The only thing that attracted me to the film is the one-line story on the way women and girls are treated in our country. I believe in equality for all and have practiced it all my life within my family. This treatment of women is what attracted me to do the film. I was convinced about the defence lawyer I ultimately played and it was a conviction that worked.

What is your take on privacy for screen personalities who have a massive fan following and attract mobs and crowds wherever they go?

Public figures and privacy cannot go together though views and attitudes differ. In films, an actor or actress starts off by wanting to be recognized. Once recognition comes, he/she wants to shun the so-called hazards that come along with it. Every public figure has to learn to live with this hazard and one has to develop an individualistic attitude. Everyone loves his privacy. An actor should be individually responsible for how much privacy he wants and how much he is willing to surrender. Media wishes to provide people with stories of private lives of public figures. In a democratic society, this will sustain because we have freedom of expression and freedom of movement. Privacy can be guarded only if things like behaviour, attitude and occupation of the person are considered and then steps are taken to draw the line somewhere.

What differences do you find in your characters in Piku, Teen and Pink your latest releases?
Piku was mostly shot indoors in Kolkata whereas Te3n was shot in real locations mostly on the northern part of Kolkata which I had little knowledge about before, even when I lived here. I saw the old houses that have heritage value and each nook and corner spells out a history of its own. I was happy that for logistic reasons, the original backdrop had to be shifted from Goa to Kolkata and this gave me the opportunity of seeing a Kolkata I had hardly ever seen before. John Biswas in Teen is a very middle-class Bengali man about my age and I had to keep it as toned down as I could make it Ribhu Dasgupta the director, gave me a simple brief. I had to remain as simple, as natural and as unaffected as I could possibly be. He also made it a point that I did not dot my dialogue with too much of Bengali because people had already heard my Bengali in Piku. The biggest challenge was to ride a scooter through the roads and streets of the city and I hardly have memories of having ridden the scooter except for a few times in college.

What about Piku?

Piku is a slice-of-life family drama. I am Bhaskar Banerjee, a middle class father who has lived almost all his life in Delhi and is an eccentric, irritating old man, a hypochondriac obsessed with his constipation. Deepika played my very loving but exasperated daughter and Irrfan runs the car service that takes us to Kolkata. It is a Bengali home. A lot of Bengalis could identify with what is being said there. Teen was shot mainly on locations in Kolkata because I had to ride a bicycle sending the family into a tizzy.

Tell us something about your role in Pink.

Deepak Sehgal is a defence lawyer who was forced to give up his legal practice because he suffered from bipolar disorder though the film keeps in the shadows. It shows up in the lawyer at certain moments in the film when he has to answer something in court and forgets to speak, or watches a cockroach crawling across on a window sill and so on. This man observes the movements of these girls who live in the next complex and suddenly decides to fight their case because he thinks that the allegations they are charged with have to do with their being women, per se and have nothing to do with what happened in reality. He speaks very little and whatever little he speaks, his arguments are like barbed wire, filled with caustic and biting sarcasm delivered with a poker face. I look at the film Pink as a ‘movement’ and it has reached beyond the screen to touch the audience, the media and the masses in a very powerful way indeed. It was great working with three very young girls who are just taking their first steps in Hindi films.