Farhan Akhtar makes a social visit to 'DNA'

Farhan Akhtar is at DNA. He’s dropped in just like that —no movie releasing, no upcoming song, nothing to promote — in short: no agenda. It’s a social visit, and he’s being social with the team. Something the multifaceted star (director/ actor/singer) is comfortable doing, being, as he tells us, ‘the anti-nerd in school’: “I was not good in studies and I socialised a lot!”

He’s wearing a hat and attitude, and he says the hat’s because he’s growing his hair for his new role (that of runner Milkha Singh, a movie which is being made right now) and ‘it’s all kind of messed up right now, so that’s the only way I can enter people’s offices’. This makes the team laugh. The attitude he says nothing about. It comes across as effortless, the way some people carry off ‘cool’ without really trying. The team tends to get cheeky about bad style sense, but today no one sees anything amiss in Farhan sporting a bowler hat in the sunless confines of After Hrs. Farhan sees nothing amiss either, he’s playing to the gallery:
 

AH: What is with that band on your wrist?
F: Oh, this is the thing called power balance. My trainer gave it to me and after a week from when he gave it to me, the company went bankrupt. (Team erupts giggling)

AH: How fashion conscious are you?
F: Uhh… I dunno. I recently read somewhere about me wearing the same shoes to everywhere. So I guess I’m not very fashion conscious.

AH: The yellow pair?
F: Yes, I love that pair. Farhan assures us that the yellow pair is not the only one he owns, and if the conversation is resembling the one between Alice and the White Rabbit, nobody notices. Instead, we discuss tattoos and Farhan shares some more of his deep dark past:

“I have one apology of a tattoo. My editor friend and me, we used to work together. It was mid 90s and one night we got very drunk and decided we should make tattoos. So he knew someone — till date if you ask me if I can take you to that place I won’t remember, we were so drunk. But he knew somebody who was a dock worker by day and a tattoo artist by night. So we got into a taxi and I just remember that we entered this shack kind of a place where the fan was really low.  So this guy opens a tattoo chart and asked which one I liked. I saw this dolphin tattoo and I have a thing for dolphins. So I got it on this shoulder — and it became a shark (team explodes as he reveals tattoo)... So that’s what happened.”

He tells us he got the scar near his eye, falling ‘off the table when I was 2.’ He won’t get plastic surgery either, ‘it has memories attached’. And he doesn’t cover it with make-up normally, though he ‘will have to’ for the Milkha biopic.

He confesses he writes poetry, which is what big sis, director Zoya Akhtar, wove into the script for the coming of age Zindagi Na Mile Dobara. “This is why Zoya wanted me to play this part. She wrote it keeping in mind this closet poet/loves sky diving part.”
 He’ll publish it when he’s comfortable ‘putting it out’. Till then there are other distractions like his dual career as actor/director, and of course the part that comes under ‘adventure junkie’. The team listens rapt as he doles out lessons from life: “I love sky diving. I hate bungee jumping. It’s so dull, like it does nothing different to you. Sky diving at least has some emotions attached to it. But bungee is just like a roller coaster…”

— Gauri Sinh