Alia Bhatt Wants To Play A Villain!

Alia Bhatt’s 23 years belie her emotional depth and effortless authenticity as an actor.

- Abhilasha Khaitan

One more thing,” Imtiaz Ali interjects as we start to wrap up our chat. We have spent about 20 minutes on the phone, the busy sounds of Patna Sahib, the famed gurdwara in Bihar’s capital, forming a backdrop to our conversation. But the filmmaker wants to make his last point. “I have to say this. Today, I woke up with this thought: Where are the Alia jokes now?”

Ali is, of course, referring to Alia Bhatt’s ill-fated 2013 debut on Koffee With Karan during which she blithely said that Prithviraj Chavan [then chief minister of Maharashtra] was the president of India. “There were so many jokes about her lack of general knowledge. I really admire how she dealt with that,” says Ali. “She has risen above.”

So much so that the joke is now on them.

Alia, still, may or may not know who the president of India is. But she knows what she has to: Acting. From the time of her 2012 debut in Karan Johar’s Student Of The Year (SOTY), where she played an effervescent young college girl caught in a love tangle, she has been careful about choosing roles that reflect “who I am”. “As actors, we have the liberty to be other people. So I decide who I want to be, like a kid in a candy shop… sometimes you pick the right candy.” Apart from the forgettable Shaandaar (2015) with Shahid Kapoor, Alia’s candyhunting instincts have not failed her.

We meet her on the Monday after her Dear Zindagi release weekend. It is her third triumph of the year, after Udta Punjab, in which she played Bauria, a Jharkhandi hockey player dealing with the harsh reality of the drugs-torn north, and a softer part in the family drama