In 2006, final year student Kshitij Patwardhan was sitting outside his college in Pune having chai and, for want of anything better, pondering the two entrances of his college.
In 2006, final year student Kshitij Patwardhan was sitting outside his college in Pune having chai and, for want of anything better, pondering the two entrances of his college. Then a thought struck him. “What if a married man comes here with a female friend and his wife also lands up with a male friend. And what if they hadn’t told each other about the meeting…what would those first two minutes be like?” He played the scene out in his head, put in dialogues and facial expressions, and before he knew it, he had a play ready, and Navi Gadi Nava Rajya was born.
This September 22, Patwardhan will be sipping tea, but in a royal setting. And if lucky, this very story may get him his first award at the second Marathi International Film and Theatre Awards (MIFTA) in London.
It all started when Patwardhan was a young boy. Growing up with a father who had a theatre background, he soon learnt to bandy around words like scripts, lighting, screenplay and the two words that would later shape his future, Purushottam Karandak — an intercollegiate theatre competition in Pune. “It teaches you everything you need to know about theatre,” says Patwardhan. In eight years, he watched over 400 one-acts and even acted in a few, but through it all learnt that scriptwriting was his forte.
Then, one December morning in 2009, he got a call from veteran actor Vikram Gokhale. “He gave me a 300-page novel and told me shooting for the film (Aaghat) would start in January. I had five days to come up with the dialogues,” says Patwardhan. The most difficult part for him was changing the medical lingo. The novel, an old one, was about medical malpractices, and had extinct terms. In three nights, with the help of his friend Sameer Vidwans, Patwardhan wrote 55 scenes. The climax was written a day after shooting began. “This wasn’t difficult. Writing for theatre is more challenging, as there you have to express comic timing, characters, scenes, and the progression of the play via dialogues,” he says.
Aaghat was just the beginning. The film’s success had producers beating a path to his door. Patwardhan has already completed two film scripts, Zameen and Satrangi Re, and is currently working on his third.
At 26, Patwardhan has had a long journey. He wants to direct his own film one day. His two nominations at MIFTA, best writer for Nava Gadi Nava Rajya, and best dialogues for Aaghat, could just be the beginning of his story.
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