Former VJ, actor and Internet entrepreneur Cyrus Sahukar is an entertainer even on the phone. He recreates a rainy evening and a traffic jam in Mumbai with little inflections and you can sense his life is a blur. A happy one, we suppose though he says, even his mother doesn’t get the hectic thrum of his life. And when he shares the details of the flights he has to board, she says excitedly, “Oh, how lovely!”
On one such flight, he met Javed Akhtar. “I find him to be an unbelievably magical person to talk to and when I asked him if he had ever planned to do the things he has done, he said that youth has a certain naivety and you just do everything that comes your way and through that, something else happens. And then one day you look back and a great plan emerges that you had nothing to do with.”
In the city on July 25 to perform in Atul Kumar’s play Trivial Disasters, Cyrus muses,”I also believe that a sort of blind naivety is incredibly powerful and though I partially wanted to do all the things I am doing…things also kept happening to me on their own and I just went along. Maybe plans work for some, for me it was always one thing that led to another.”
As a 14 year old going on 30, he was already on radio and in a school band, and acting. Barry John was one of his earliest mentors, as was Roshan Abbas whose recreation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Starlight Express in 1998 featured Cyrus. He also remembers performing for Tihar inmates and in retrospect empathises with the ‘captive’ audience, forced to watch, “really bad actors performing awful educational theatre!”
The biggest turning point was winning an MTV VJ hunt and becoming their youngest VJ ever. He was 18, and incredulous because it was like, “being left in a room full of plasticine, toys, sand and being given the freedom to create anything.” He recalls, “There was no unhealthy competition and we were just making up stuff as we want along.” Some of that ‘stuff’ manifested memorable spoofs like Simi Girebaal! He laughs, “That was in 2007-2008 when MTV was mainstreaming spoofs in a show called Fully Faltu.” No cinematic lore was too sacred to be mocked and then they all hit upon the idea of Simi Girebaal. The trick was to capture the, “weird sincerity” in those they chose to spoof. He recounts, “We did 13 episodes in a week. There was lack of sleep, lunacy and no scripts! I have memories of turning to one of our writers Sharib Hashmi (recently seen in Filmistan) to stand in for a character at 3 am! And the whole thing spiralled into a success and turned spoofs into full-fledged shows.”
He refuses to be judgmental about comedy today and says, “I always feel compassionate towards comedians because it is a tough, unforgiving business. You are always walking a tight rope. A joke is not a song like Summer of 69 that keeps playing on, you have to keep reinventing. The comic culture was different in MTV, we never crossed certain lines like making sexist jokes though we had freedom to do anything. Now there is the pressure to please everyone. But perceptions about comedy are changing with the Internet and since we have such a large populace, there will be a wide variety. There will be jokes about sex, and puns. And because comedy is subjective, some will like it, some won’t.”
After strong roles in Delhi-6, Aisha and Love, Breakups, Zindagi, Cyrus is due to appear in a Mira Nair film, and talks about his latest project, Atul Kumar’s Trivial Disasters excitedly. “It’s a fun cast and the stories are about our weird lives and quite dark. Atul is a magical actor himself and gives his actors space to learn at their own pace. His take on the world is very interesting. I am looking forward to coming to Bangalore, get heaps of biryani from Nagarjuna or Bheema’s, get my stock of scented phenyl from a mall and recall all the great concerts I have attended here!”
And the big picture..is it emerging now? “I have been doing this for over 10 years. Now, I feel like a travelling salesmen, who can’t sit still. So…” There is a smile somewhere filling in the blanks.