Q&A WITH SAIF ALI KHAN

Saif Ali Khan on his new web series, writing his memoir and reading ghost stories to his son

Q Your second web show is the Amazon Prime political drama Tandav. Are you surprised it has taken us this long to have a series centred around politics?

It’s why I did the show. Politics is fairly exciting and dynamic to dramatise. We are political people, we talk about it a lot and it is a part of our lives.

Tandav is not a documentary, but we have tried to be realistic and push the envelope in a commercial way. You would hope that real people are not this extreme but who knows, may be they are?

Q You are also one of the few mainstream actors who shuttles between big screen films and web.

When I did Sacred Games, senior producers told me I will end up being a web actor. But if it is interesting work, where everybody is bringing their A-game, there are top directors involved and the attitude is not that web means small screen, so let’s do a small idea, it is great. You have to be careful of the quality.

Q You announced last year that you will release a memoir. How is the writing coming along?

It has a more as-told-to, conversational style. My mother [Sharmila Tagore] feels the book is something I should do because I have seen changes in my life and in India itself—from the boarding schools to even the Delhi of the 1990s which was so much fun. It is really just a nostalgic, lest-we-forget exercise.

Q Did you manage to get any reading done last year?

I read lots. Mostly short stories written by the likes of Charles Dickens, M.R. James and some Victorian ghost stories which Taimur [son] also likes.