In school, the good students sitting in the front benches, used to bore me. I would instead be fascinated by the bad boys, the ones who pull hair and pinch you. Later on, my interest shifted to the street goons and then to faction groups and then to gangsters and of course finally to terrorists. Someone asked me if I have ever fancied myself as the bad guy and if I try to live that through my films.
But let me tell you, nothing could have been further from the truth. I consider myself partly a bad-guy psychologist and partly a filmmaker searching for interesting subjects. No one can deny that bad guys are more interesting than good guys. You will find a thousand books written on Hitler compared to Gandhi. Dawood Ibrahim occupies more pages and airtime than philanthropists. I think the reason for this is because we are all born bad and then education, upbringing, religion and social values curb our basic instincts and create a facade of us being good guys. But basic instinct, by its very definition, cannot be curbed and will be just waiting to come out whenever the opportunity arises. Hence, our fascination with the bad guys.
A bad guy is like a kid who refuses to grow up. The innocence of kids, I feel, is one of the biggest myths we believe in. For starters, I don’t ever remember being innocent ever since I was conscious. Kids are instinctively bad and this you can see in the glee in their eyes when they trample over an ant or burn an insect in a candle. It’s only with an application of social evolution that most of them eventually fall in line to serve the requirement of society and become the so-called good guys. But the anti-social bad guys refuse to grow up. A kid, when he is born, will think that he is the centre of the universe and then as he grows up, he slowly comes to terms with the fact that he is just one among billions. But a kid who refuses to grow up or more correctly refuses to grow into a society will be termed anti-social. Although at heart he is still a kid, but maybe not quite cute.
