Still the same boy from ‘Aaja Ve’: Rajkummar Rao on his journey since Sona Mohapatra’s 2006 song

Rajkummar Rao has fond memories of featuring in Sona Mohapatra’s ‘Aaja Ve’ music video when he was a first-year FTII student. And though he has made a name for himself as a versatile star, the actor said he is still the same boy who was thrilled to be in front of the camera for the first time.

The song, released in 2006 as part of Mohapatra’s album ‘Sona’, saw Rao making an appearance as a strict schoolmaster in a vibrant rural setting only to later shake a leg with his students and fellow villagers. “I’m still the same boy who was in that ‘Aaja Ve’ song. I made him up like a pansy schoolteacher. He’s a schoolteacher but I thought kuch to alag karte hain,” Rao, 40, told PTI in an interview.

And it wasn’t just him in the video. Vijay Varma and Jaideep Ahlawat, Rao’s batchmates from Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), also appear as a barber and a sadhu, respectively. “It has almost all my batchmates. There’s Jaideep and Vijay as well. There are a lot of people. The whole class was there because one of our seniors, Deepti, was shooting the video. She said, ‘Guys, we are making this video. Do you want to act in it?’ All of us got excited because we were just first-year students. We were like. ‘Yeah, sure!’” Rao recalled.

The actor said it was pure fun to be working with his batchmates. “There were 20 of us in the class and it was just fun, just being with your classmates and shooting,” he added.

After graduating from FTII, Rao got his break in movies with Dibakar Banerjee’s anthology movie ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’ in 2010, followed by appearances in movies such as ‘Ragini MMS’, ‘Shaitan’, ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ and ‘Talaash’.

People eventually took note of him with Hansal Mehta's 2012’s ‘Shahid’, which also won him the best actor National Award. Since then, the actor has built a storied filmography of critically acclaimed and commercially successful titles such as ‘Aligarh’, ‘Bareilly Ki Barfi’, ‘Trapped’, ‘Newton’, ‘Badhaai Do’ and the ‘Stree’ film franchise.

Reflecting on his evolution as an artiste, Rao said he has naturally grown as a performer.

“I’ve certainly matured because you also lived those many years. There’s a certain maturity that comes with age and you have those many years of experience with you. As a person, nothing has changed. I’m not counting materialistic things because they don’t matter,” he said.