Nothing.The format of the programme is very watertight and the company which owns this game show does not allow any changes. The only thing that we are doing is that we are doing it in Hindi.

That’s a role (I played). Whatever kind of role was written for me I had to do it to the best of my ability. That is somebody else’s idea, somebody else’s writing, somebody else’s clothes, somebody else’s thought. Here, I am hoping that something of what I am, or what I would like to be, or how I would like to present myself comes out. It is more a laid back sort of atmosphere here and people are enjoying it.

Certainly. A game show like this does give you the opportunity to interact with people outside like I would in my normal life.

I am still doing movies. Every month, I give 7 to 10 days to KBC and the rest are for the movies.

I get satisfaction in both mediums. I get satisfaction when I go in front of the movie cameras and I get satisfaction when I do television. It is a healthy mix. In television, there is no time and that’s the difficult part. You have to just be thinking about different aspects on your own and very quickly, perhaps simultaneously, and react. That’s the difficult part. Every time when I have to go in front of the cameras it is very frightening.

Joint families are a part of our tradition. We believe in the strength of our families. This has been going on for thousands of years and you can’t break it suddenly. And the tradition has many merits. The western countries attribute many of their ills to the breaking up of the family. There, as soon as a son is 17-18 years’ old woh namaste kar ke ghar chhod kar chala jata hai. Uske baad use na apne mata-pita ka dhyan rehta hai, na chinta hoti hai. Aur hamare yahan iska ulta hota hai. Jaise hi beta bada hota hai, kehta hai bauji, aap ghar par baithe aaram kare, hum aap ki dekh-bhaal karenge. Both these traditions are different from each other. Par hamari pratha mein nishchit roop se zyada dum hai...

Yeh expectation hai ki woh kahe ki aap ghar baitheye aur hum kamayenge aur aap ki dekh-bhaal karenge.

It is said that every profession or a vocation affects the person involved in it. How much do you think acting has added or taken away from the type of person that you were when you started?

I think that the acting profession is one of observation — observing human beings. So, even while we talk or go outside and meet other people, we are quite unconsciously always assimilating or making note of characters, situations, performances of human beings. And it comes very naturally to us. So in that respect, I find myself being a little more observant. I don’t deliberately go out and search for any input but more or less it keeps happening quite inadvertently. In many respects I feel that this is somewhat dangerous to us as human beings and for our psyche. This is because during the course of our careers when we have to perform different kinds of roles, there is a desire to perform them well. And we feel that performing the role well means getting into a situation which is as real to that related situation. Therefore, many a times we feel that we have spent a certain emotion from within us which perhaps would come to a normal human being once in a lifetime. But for us it comes 10 times, 20 times. We are always very scared that were we to be faced with the real situation ever in our lives would the emotions we express be the real thing or just another performance. For example, we enact scenes about a father or mother dying or even a son dying, and when we enact these sequences we try to imagine as to what the feeling in our hearts will be when such tragedies take place in real life. We come up with a similar emotion and intensity for the scene.... aur Ishwaar na kare, jab hamare niji jivan mein agar aisa ho to us samay kya emotion niklega? Kyunki aisa ho sakta hai ki jo bhavana thi us ek kshan ke liye, us ek mauke ke liye jivan mein, usey shayad hamne kharch kar diya hai. (And God forbid, if anything like this happens in our personal lives then what sort of emotion will flow? It can happen that the emotion that we had within us for a particular moment, for that particular situation in our life, we have already spent it.)

No, I don’t. I do not. I feel that even now there are moments in the family or personal moments where emotions do erupt.

See, obviously it came from a feeling of being ostracised, of being victimised. And when the victimisation is too large for you to battle it immediately because you have an entire hostile government, an entire hostile media, you have hostile people on the streets since that’s the kind of impression that has been built up, it is very difficult to fight. So you remain quiet. You take it on your face. You take it on your chin and then wait to disprove that. So, I felt that it was better to have patience, to work at the facts, to bring out the truth in what I felt was the correct way. And that’s what we did. We went to court, not in this country because the allegation did not emerge from India but from Sweden, Switzerland and London. We went to all these three courts and we fought the battle legally there. We won in each one of these countries. We resurrected the bad name that we had received. That’s what I meant. Sometimes you have to be patient, sometimes when a wind of negativity blows it is very difficult to stand up to it, especially when you have an entire government against you.

I feel neither. I have no sense of having been been victorious in something. I don’t feel a victim as I don’t feel that I had done anything wrong. But I certainly don’t want to beat my chest and say ki bhai, maine bahut bara kamaal kar diya. Ho jata hai kabhi kabhi jivan mein. Jivan mein thoda bahut sangharsh bahut zaroori hai.

No. Hamare mitr hain Mulayam Singhji aur Amar Singhji aur main jaanta hoon ki unhone agar mujhse kabhi kuch kaha karne ko to main zaroor chahunga... par main yeh bhi jaanta hoon ki woh mujhse koi bhi galat kaam nahi karvayenge. I am genuinely not interested in politics.

I dont have any. I read newspapers for my information. I don’t comment.

Nahi complex to nahi hota.Aur main aisa bada havua bhi nahi khara karta hoon. My duty is to relax them, make them feel comfortable. The contestants come through a process of selection, there are several rounds of them, and, finally, when they arrive here we talk to them, have rehearsals and then start the recording.

Mere ko aisa nahi lagta ki log bahut zyada nervous hote hain. But there may be some who may be nervous and we try to relax them for we genuinely want that those who have reached here after such hard work must go back with some winnings. Baat kar ke pata chal jata hai ki kitne nervous hai.

I can’t read people well. I am a bad reader of people. But yes, the format of the game allows you to see which way, which direction a person is going. The format allows us to prompt, to keep telling people that you have so many lifelines left or you have won so much.

The first thing is that I don’t believe in any kind of success. I have just been doing my work. Success is a very delicate moment. It is not very difficult to get there but it is very difficult to maintain it. It is also very fragile. It is never permanent. What goes up, must come down. I think one has to look at success from a distance. If you get too involved in this whole business of success, it can be terrible. It can be very destructive because you start working for just success and nothing else. I would like to believe that I have never done anything like that. I don’t manipulate. I just flow with the tide and I have never gone out of my way to seek any particular position or to destroy somebody else so that I could go forward. I think these are not in my nature. So I am happy if things happen well. And babuji ki sikhayi hui baat main dauhrata rehta hoon: ‘maan ka ho to achcha hai aur na ho to zyada achcha.’

They were very supportive. Both parents. Babuji is from almost middle class-lower middle class family. My mother was from a very aristrocratic family in Punajb. But we always lived with whatever my father could provide. Aap to jante hi hain ki babuji Allahabad University mein the — panch sau rupaiye milte the. So he wanted ki bhaiya kuch professori-professori kar lo, kuch teacher-veechar ban jao. All of us think within our own specific ambit. So for him, it was not a shock, I think, but ajeeb si baat thi that I was leaving Delhi for Calcutta jahan us tarah ki company hoti hai, boxwallahe hote hai, tie, golf aur executive hote hai. But he did not stop me. Again after four or five years, I said that I wanted to go on from there to here (Mumbai). But from his side there was no interference. Both my parents were very supportive. I am here because of them.