"I found my way in this industry because of Farhan" - Arjun Mathur 
By Subhash K. Jha, July 9, 2008 - 13:58 IST
Farhan Akhtar has found a new blue-eyed boy. Arjun Mathur who played Irrfan Khan's gay lover in Mira Nair's short film, Migration written by Zoya Akhtar and then again Shabana Azmi and Boman Irani's son in Farhan Akhtar's short-film Positive, is now getting ready to play an important part in Zoya Akhtar's directorial debut Luck By Chance.
"It's a very interesting though small part of a theatre and television actor named Abhimanyu. Farhan has been very supportive. I wouldn't have found my way around this industry without him." But before that, the Delhi dude plays a boorish but benign Bihari waiter in new-director, Rajan Menon's Barah Aana. "I play a waiter. Vijay Raaz plays the watchman, and Naseeruddin Shah a driver from North India. We play three friends and migrants in Mumbai who stay in the Dharavi slums," reveals Arjun. The film, which also features the Brick Lane actress, Tannishtha Chatterjee, acquires an added significance in the light of the recent anti-migrant agitations in Maharashtra. "The film was called Bhaiyya to begin with. But the rights to that title were with a Bhojpuri producer," says Arjun.
And last but not the least, Arjun who's a trained actor from Barry John's institute as well as the Lee Strasburg Theatre & Film Institute In New York, has just completed another socially-relevant film. "The short-film format doesn't seem to leave me," grins Arjun. "After doing the two AIDS films with Farhan and Mira I've just completed another short-film for a 10-film omnibus on Mumbai called Mumbai Cutting. My film, the last of the 10, is directed by Ayush Raina. People like Sudhir Mishra, Anurag Kashyap, and Rituparno Sengupta directed the others. It was premiered recently at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles."
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