Nana dons a writer's role in Yatra

Kolkata: It's hard to recall a film in which Nana Patekar played a character the common man could identify with. For over two decades, he has been playing the hardened cop, an obsessed husband or the good-at-heart anti-social.

But Nana is finally set to shed the trappings of the encounter cop in Gautam Ghosh's Yatra, in which he plays a writer.

Director Gautam Ghosh, who shook Indian cinema with his 1985 film Paar, is in the last stages of shooting of his fourth Hindi film Yatra in Kolkata. And Nana Patekar, who plays the lead role in the film, is so impressed with the director that he says his career as an actor would have moved in a different direction had he met Ghosh 15 years ago.

Nana plays a character who dwells in two different worlds, the real world and the world of his own creation.

And he is so impressed with Ghosh that he regrets not having worked with him earlier. "I have been repeatedly saying that had I met Gautam 10 or 15 years ago, I could have achieved a lot more as an actor. I've learnt a lot working with him," he says.

Ghosh says he had written the story and screenplay with Nana in mind as the protagonist.

Nana's character, Dashrath Joglekar, he says, is a representative of creative people, and in many ways, brings out his own thoughts and sufferings. "Dashrat is like so many people, myself and many of my friends. I've seen many writers, artist and people who enjoy life, but they also suffer because they imagine and they fantacise. There are so many elements inside Dashrat," says Ghosh.

The film also features Rekha as a girl from Benaras and Deepti Naval, who makes a comeback of sorts, plays Dashrath Joglekar's wife. In the movie, Rekha's character is a figment of the writer's imagination.

Yatra has been extensively shot in Hyderabad. There are a few more sequences to be shot in Delhi and Hyderabad, before post-production starts.

The cast and the director are hopeful that Yatra would be as critically acclaimed as Paar and also rake in the moolah to make the producers happy.

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