By Abhilasha Ojha

He may have been born into a filmi family with Aamir Khan for an uncle, but debutant actor Imran Khan is incredibly grounded.

Imran Khan is candid as he voices his concerns about the Hindi film industry. It's not so much about the industrywallahs as about, "me, Imran, and whether I fit here at all". As a film journalist, it's a line we've heard before: Most actors have repeated it, often in a bid to applaud themselves, to reiterate that they don't fit the mould of partygoers, never mind they do end up at every film do.

But a genuine concern in Imran's tone makes us want to believe him. "I am a very reserved person, I like being on my own," he reiterates, admitting that press interviews, promotional gigs for his film, are, after a point, not his cup of tea.

It's ironical that Imran even mentions this at all; after all, he's three films-old already — Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na, his first, releases next week, while he's already shooting for Kidnap and Luck. That apart, he's somewhat used to the arc lights; as a child artiste in Jo Jeeta Wahi Sikander, he was admittedly upset when a scene required another artiste to pull down his pants to show his cute baby butt.

This experience apart, he's the nephew of Aamir Khan, one of the most popular and arguably the best actor of our times. By his own admission, Imran grew up seeing scripts just lying around the house.

"There was an editing facility (a first of its kind those days) in the basement of the house, it wasn't unusual to hear rough versions of songs getting perfected, oh, and there were canisters of film rolls stacked in one corner," he says.

Grandson of Nasir Hussain, who had "a remarkable rise in the film industry even at a time when it was looked down upon", Imran, is hardly nervous or anxious about his launch vehicle — directed by a first-timer, the talented scriptwriter-lyricist Abbas Tyrewala. "I'll give you a boring answer, I'm not nervous at all. How's that possible?" he throws back at us.

For someone who studied in a boarding school in Ooty for some time before shifting to a gurukul tucked away in the Nilgiris with not more than 25-30 students, going to the US to study cinema was a dramatic change ("a big jhatka, shock").

"I was trying so hard to adjust to a life which was so, so different. From hardly seeing any people, here I was surrounded in a new country by so many," he says. It's perhaps the same feeling he gets in the Hindi film industry today, surrounded by so many people, glamour and glitz, so much that it unsettles you. "I'm not at all hero material. I'm still a very thin guy and not muscular like most actors in the industry," he says, a koel cooing in the background, outside his room, in the balcony, I imagine.

But he does mention that he's changing as per the requirement of the scripts that are coming his way. Kidnap, he says enthusiastically, will have him portray an action role for which he's already building up muscles. "I'm not," he repeats, "not hero material."

It's exactly that non-hero look that worked for Imran, the minute Tyrewala saw him and signed him on for Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. "I was looking for someone to project a believable character," adds Tyrewala. Imran fitted the bill. And that was also the beginning of friendship between these two debutants. Despite their diverse backgrounds, the two could relate to each other.

Tyrewalla, son of an optician father, grew up in what he calls "a typical Ismaili neighbourhood in south Byculla". Imran, on the other hand, had a successful family in the film industry but stayed grounded because of his mother who doesn't quite trust life in the movies, given the volatile nature of the industry.

"She didn't want me to join films, she knows the pitfalls," says Imran. In contrast, Tyrewala's mother, says Tyrewala, "wanted the children — my two sisters and I — to dream big".

Imran agrees that he and Tyrewala bonded in a big way. "We've not only made the film, we've seen all the drama that it created," says Imran, admitting that like Tyrewala, he feels considerably detached from his debut vehicle.

"It was in the making for two years, we were left without a financier, so in a way, it was frustrating," says Imran. "Interviews, press promotions are ways to create awareness about a film, but eventually, it'll carry by word-of-mouth," feels Imran.

For someone who's already getting tagged as the "new-age Aamir", letting audiences slip into a QSQT mode, Imran says he has always loved filming family get-togethers on his handycam. He helped Mansoor, his uncle, on the sets of Josh, "running and getting coffee for everyone".

"I watched Aamir's films but even as a kid I could tell the film industry then dished out escapist fare, veering towards ‘trends' than stories really. I'm lucky to be part of the industry where unusual scripts are getting made and getting accepted too," he says.

While Dil Chahta Hai was, according to Imran, "a watershed moment in the industry", a film like Jab We Met, he feels, did away with the classic, brawny hero image. His own character in Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na is someone who is very simple and adopts Gandhian principles, a far cry from an angry young man image. He dismisses suggestions that Aamir is taking career decisions on his behalf. "Aamir tells me, ‘find your work, find your own space'."

For now, Imran's search has begun.