National Crush, Future Husband!
It became real to me that the spell of Rohit Saraf has reached the little mohalla of my hometown when a young girl called me and asked with a voice swaying in nervous anticipation, “Agar vo kabhi Patiala aaye, aap hamein milvaa doge (If he comes to Patiala, would you help me meet him)?”
I’ve lost count of the number of times this request – or some version of it – has landed in my Insta DMs. Not to speak of the infinite Rohit Saraf fan pages and posts with heartfelt open letters (most addressing him as ‘Future Husband’), stunning art dedicated to him, and the unending threads of mushy comments mushrooming across the web in the last three months – most of them carrying that unmistakable whiff of first love.
I guess it’s almost a rite of passage for a teenager to fall head over heels for an on-screen persona. That is how most of us start to discover this dimension of our existence – the sense of feeling attracted, the capacity to fall in love.
My first memory of noticing everyone’s blue-eyed boy is a scene in The Sky Is Pink (2019). His character is at a train station speaking to his little sister on the phone, who is slowly dying. I remember thinking to myself that this actor has a profound ability to express love as well as pain.
That should explain why I was rather kicked when I got to know that Rohit had been cast as Rishi Singh Shekhawat – one of the protagonists on the Netflix show Mismatched. My co-writers – Aarsh Vora, Sunayana Kumari – and I had visualised Rishi as an 18-year-old hopeless romantic whose favourite pastime is driving his grandma around while listening to old Hindi film songs. He is cheesy and he owns it. He is someone who doesn’t belong in this era. He’s almost an impossibility.
What Rohit did was not only make Rishi believable, but he made cheesy cool. And he did it with an unassuming charm that has cast the aforementioned spell on... well, just about every young girl and several young boys I know.
Being a writer, my mind sometimes wanders into an infinite loop. Is it the character that should get credit for the love an actor gets, or is it the actor who makes that character memorable? In other words, who did the viewer (read ‘I’) fall in love with back in the ’90s – Rahul or Shah Rukh Khan? Some days, I’m certain it was Rahul who made girls believe that
“Is it the character that should get credit for the love an actor gets, or is it the actor who makes that character memorable? Who did the viewer fall in love with: Rahul or Shah Rukh Khan?”
“IT’S FUNNY AND FLATTERING [TO BE CALLED NATIONAL CRUSH]. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT IN THE YEAR OF THE PANDEMIC, I WOULD BE LABELLED THIS!” —ROHIT SARAF