Actor Neil Bhoopalam says it’s unfair to define somebody’s coolness quotient on the basis of languages. And this is what his latest Kiska Hoga Thinkistaan 2 aims to highlight. By Chahak Mittal
William is not the villain like everyone is perceiving him to be after watching the trailer of MX Player’s Kiska Hoga Thinkistaan 2. Actor Neil Bhoopalam says that his character is just a strict new head of the company who wants the work to be refined and perfect.
“That’s all. Though that’s how it was actually pitched initially — negative. But they told me that he is just a person who is doing his job. There might be a few points where the audience might get a ‘baddy’ kind of vibe from me. My job was to try and make that as natural as possible. I was told that during a meeting, like a strict boss, I cannot sugar-coat my words to not hurt your feelings. At the same time, I would not even go out of the way to make you feel bad. I just simply tell you that your ideas are not up to the mark. And now, it’s up to you to feel bad,” he says and laughs that while he was shooting this, it was quite relatable. “We have all experienced this in our work lives and especially in the first five to six years of our jobs. It does hurt. But later, you realise that it wasn’t deliberately mean. They just knew it wasn’t meant to work out,” says he.
The series spins narrative around two contrasting copy writers and content creators, who work at MTMC, a huge advertising agency, and traces their journeys and a tiff between English and Hindi content.
After a whole day of seemingly-endless interviews, an early morning and an coffee-only meal had exhausted him but the Shaitan actor was fresh and quick to answer why he chose the script. “I really enjoyed reading it. I have studied advertising in college. It was something I knew. And this was the closest I could have got to the world of advertising, which I had someday thought that I would be a part of. Even the directors and producers of the show have come from an advertising background and have made the script so believable. There’s no faff. It’s all true,” he says.
Of course, he has come a long way from college to today. What you study in college does remain with you but is eventually a history. So what was Neil’s research work or better, some digging into the history? As he thanks me for asking this question, he says that even it might not look like that, but they did some research work. He says, “However, our preparation was collective. We all sat together and worked on how you pitch the idea to the clients, how you make presentations. We studied why certain advertisements worked out and why others did not. I studied this it, in a way, revamped a lot of things too. And because of that, it gave me an opportunity to perform in a way, in which I haven’t performed before.”
The series shows how the two protagonists gain success and popularity on the basis of their languages — Hindi and English. While the content in English gets high scores and is considered to be ‘classy,’ the one in Hindi is seen as incompetent and old-fashioned. However, Neil doesn’t quite get this conflict between the two and how people are judged on the basis of that in India due to his background. “I have had it the other way round because I grew up mostly speaking English at home. But it’s unfair to define a coolness quotient on the basis of what language one speaks. However, that kind of judgment has reduced considerably now. I see many who proudly own their language today. It’s not like they don’t understand English, but they prefer to speak in the language they are comfortable with. Sometimes you also explain things in a better way in your mother tongue. So why not say it that way? Also, we know that communication is key. The more languages we know, the brain gets smarter and not suffer from Alzheimer’s,” he chuckles and reminds us that even the title of the show is designed as a combination of both the languages — Thinkistaan — to give them the equal status.
