Meet the Major who chose acting over weapons

Remember Vishal Bharadwaj’s critically acclaimed Haider? The scene, in which an army major arrests Shahid Kapoor’s father Hilaal Mir (played by Narendra Jha) before ordering his troops to bomb his house? What if we tell you that the person who played that character was a real Major in the Indian army? Yeah, no big deal, you may say. Now, how about us telling you that he is also an IIM Calcutta graduate who has experience of working in graveyard shifts at a Delhi call center? Sounds too illustrious to be an actor’s profile, isn’t it?
Meet Mohommed Ali Shah, the actor who turned down a respectable profile in the Indian army and a fat pay cheque in the corporate world to pursue his childhood dream of becoming
an actor.
Born to a family that has more actors than army men, Shah’s inclination towards acting developed from an early age. “From my uncle Naseeruddin Shah, his wife Ratna chachi, their daughter and my cousin Heeba, Pankaj (Kapoor) uncle, everybody is from NSD. So, when I told them I want to be an actor they univocally said, ‘Actor banna hain to pehle qualify karo’,” says the 37-year-old.
Shah got rejected in the final interview of the NSD entrance. Though it did take a toll on his determination, he soon pulled himself together and decided to give it another try. But with a year to kill before that, Shah joined a call centre in Delhi and it came as a blessing in disguise. “My job trained me in voice modulation, speech therapy and voice and accent, which I knew someday would help me in my acting career,” he avers.
Shah faced another setback when he couldn’t clear the entrance on his second attempt and thereafter joined the Indian Army to, as he says, “keep the tradition of the family.”
“My first posting was at the Indo-Pak border in Jammu and Kashmir for two years. Our post was just 30 meters from those of the Pakistanis and we could hear everything they were talking,” he recalls. After this, he was sent to the Northeast as an ADC to a general where he was conferred a gallantry award for his services. But even the army couldn’t get the acting bug out of the Major and soon he bid adieu to the service and enrolled himself in one of the premiere B-schools of India. “It was a tough decision to make. I was newly-married at that time and it was a definite risk. I chose Marketing in IIM-C for two reasons — firstly, to prepare myself to sell my talent in Mumbai and secondly it was a financial support system,” he informs.
But even a fat pay cheque couldn’t deter him from pursuing his dream. “Soon it dawned on me that I am falling for the corporate trap of living from pay cheque to pay cheque. And if I don’t take a plunge now I will never be able to live my dream. I quit my job and came to Mumbai,” he says.
One day he heard about Vishal Bharadwaj making his version of Hamlet in J&K and soon, was playing a Major’s role in Haider. “Many don’t know, but I brought a lot more to the table than just acting. Vishal Sir needed stuntmen and I told him not to hire any and arranged a platoon of 30 ex-army men,” he says.
“All the guys you see in the movie in Haider are my ex-colleagues from the army. After all, trained hands are any day better than hired ones when it comes to dealing with military weapons,” he quips.
Shah’s journey as an actor got a real thrust when director Tigmanshu Dhulia spotted his talent and offered him a role in his upcoming Yaara, which also stars Shruti Haasan and Vidyut Jamwal.
“I play a sardar in the film and the role is parallel to the lead. I have worked real hard to get into the character and hope it works out well,” he says adding that to get into the skin of the character, he did seva in a gurudwara and even read the Guru Granth Sahib.
In a nutshell, Shah’s story is not about an army man who left the army to become an actor, but is about an actor who was in the army for a while.