Through a career that turns 15 years old this summer, Farhan Akhtar has left little room for regret. An actor, filmmaker, writer, gender activist, devoted husband and father, the multi-hyphenate carries both criticism and fame lightly. And that has made all the difference
Introducing Farhan Akhtar is a cumbersome task. Exhausting even. Try and say actor-director-producer-writer-singer-musician-TV host-activist all in one breath.You understand, then, why when he tells ForbesLife India that he won’t be adding yet another hyphen to his job description anytime soon, we aren’t terribly sympathetic.
“It was embarrassing,” he says, recounting his time at a ‘friendly’ game of cricket in his building. “I was hit for some four sixes and bowled seven wides in an over; one ball landed at my feet,” he says. “I was playing after 8-9 years. I thought it would be like cycling, which you never forget, but clearly not.” To make matters worse, his abysmal performance was witnessed by Gaurav Kapur, who is one of the anchors for the Indian Premier League (IPL). “He told everyone on the IPL circuit! So when I went to Kolkata to perform at the inauguration, some cricketers asked me if I play cricket well,” he laughs, adding, “so now I have to brush up on my cricketing skills. I sucked at it.”
The law of averages is catching up, perhaps. Because, since he entered Bollywood 15 years ago, he hasn’t particularly “sucked” at anything (although his singing has had its share of critics, but more on that later).
The trick to being a successful multi-hyphenate is delegation, points out Akhtar. “If I was to say that I need to make every single decision in everything I do, I wouldn’t be able to do anything,” he says. “You share a vision plan with the people you work with and once that’s done, everyone knows what needs to be done. Whether it is with Ritesh (Sidhwani) at Excel Entertainment, with my band or with FarOut Media, I trust the people I work with. You have to let go of control.” The division of functions helped at Excel, for instance. “Ritesh’s skills are organisational or in getting funding for a film and [in that] I am the bouncing board. Similarly, when it’s about the script, music or casting, I play a slightly more pivotal role.”
Music might be Akhtar’s lifeblood but it is also that one aspect of his professional life that has been critiqued the most. Some have even called him “tone-deaf”. But Akhtar isn’t perturbed. “There are genres, bands and musicians whom I don’t like and I don’t listen to them,” he shrugs. “That power lies with me. So I am very okay with people not wanting to listen to me.”
Regret is not a motif of his 15-year-long career, be it his music or his movies. “Every film you make is a success in its own way because you started off trying to make something good. Regardless of what people might say, you’ve done all that you could. Of course, there is a whole other sweetness to the experience when the film is accepted. [But] there is a lot of learning when a film doesn’t do well,” he says. “Eventually everything does help you in some way or the other.” The lowest point of his career, says Akhtar, was the box-office failure of the Hrithik Roshan-starrer Lakshya (2004). “It affected me only because it was such a hard film to make,” he says. “But, in retrospect, it seems like the film worked because so many people have told me that they liked it.”(This story appears in the May-June 2015 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)