Siddharth: Playing the Parts

I’M NOT GONNA lie,” says Sid­dharth, who plays the late Squad­ron Leader Ajay Ahuja in the ac­claimed new series Operation Safed Sagar on Netflix. “It reminded me of playing Shaheed Bhagat Singh in Rang De Basanti 20 years ago. I told my young co-stars within the first two weeks of shooting that the greatest thing you can achieve is to be friends. It’s important for the band of brothers to bond. Rang De Basanti has, over the years, become like a dosti ki misaal (example of friendship) for many. The world is always going through a tough time. It’s important to give young people emotional support that connects cinema to their daily lives.”

Siddharth has made a habit of play­ing young Indians aspiring for some­thing higher in life. Much like Squadron Leader Ahuja of the Golden Arrows unit of the 17th Squadron, the young MiG-21 pilot who was martyred in the 1999 Kargil War. Whether it was the erstwhile young man who gets involved in electoral politics in Mani Ratnam’s Ayutha Ezhuthu (2004) or the poor little rich boy who decides to take on a corrupt system that has killed his friend (ironically a MiG-21 fighter pilot) in Rang De Basanti (2006), Siddharth is best remembered as the reb­el without a pause. With Operation Safed Sagar, which has already become part of popular culture iconography with even an iconic Amul billboard, he comes of age. It’s a process he has been moving towards with increasingly mature roles, most recently as the uncle who helps uncover his little niece’s abuse in his home production, Chithha (2023).

That is one of the things that strike one about Siddharth. A former assistant to Mani Ratnam in Kannathil Muthamit­tal (2002), which starred R Madhavan, whose trajectory mirrors his, Siddharth is a cinema nerd. He loves the movies, and everything to do with them, from how they are made, edited and distributed.

At 47, the actor has worked suc­cessfully across the Tamil, Telugu and Hindi film industries. With Operation Safed Sagar, he is proud of the young actors who play the pilots he is training onscreen. “Their names on our What­sApp group, Kick the Tyres, are the call signs in the series,” he adds, referring to actors Abhay Verma, Mihir Ahuja, Taaruk Raina and Arnav Bhasin, who are called Dhali, Baldy, Sangy, and Goofy. “Our group is called Golden Arrows,” he says, after the name of the unit in the series, which he is tasked to mentor by his friend, Wing Commander Tony Dhanoa, played by Jimmy Shergill.

Film scholar Baradwaj Rangan says Siddharth is at a very exciting point in his career. “When you are a successful lead­ing man there is a temptation to make you the sun around which the movie revolves. The hero can never become a character, especially in the South. But Siddharth is curating his career in a way that straddles commercial cinema and entertainment that is considered more offbeat. He has a superb instinct for pick­ing stories that have meat and also have sensible budgets such as Chithha, which he developed himself.”

Siddharth (he dropped his surname, Suryanarayan, in the early years of his film career) has never played it safe—tak­ing risky punts where safe shots would have worked and stepping away when leaning in would have more commercial sense. After two huge hits in Tamil, with Shankar’s Boys (2003) and Ayutha Ezhuthu, instead of consolidating his star status in that industry, he learnt Telugu to play an NRI in Prabhu Deva’s romantic drama, Nuvvostanante Nenoddantana in 2005. Fol­lowing his role as Karan Singhania in Rang De Basanti, he went back to Hyderabad to do the family drama Bommarillu, directed byBhaskar. AndafterplayingShivainDeepa Mehta’s movie, Midnight’s Children (2012) and Bhanu in Prayag Akbar’s dystopian Netflix series, Leila (2019), he waited till last year to act in the international adapta­tion of Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’, for Netflix, opposite Freida Pinto.

Operation Safed Sagar, where Siddharth gets to play the role of a serious yet fun-loving mentor seems to have come at the right time in his career, as he transitions from the eternal boy to the mature older man—a process usually marked with unease in an actor’s career. But taking on the late Ajay Ahuja’s role was a no-brainer for him. “Right from the get go, the project being blessed by the Indian Air Force was a very big green flag for me. In the past even if something has been made it was from a distance. This is a collab if I can call it that. Then Netflix was backing it, making it their tentpole project for this time period,” he says. “Third and most im­portant, the families of the martyrs were involved in the creative process. I wanted to know the intentions of all the people involved because even if one person was doing it for commercial reasons it would have vitiated the atmosphere.”

He was concerned, in particular, about Ahuja’s wife, Alka. “Netflix told me she was involved in the project and I thought I needed her permission before I could say yes. It was an offer I just couldn’t refuse. Also I knew the Indian Air Force was permitting me to wear their uniform, I had to return the favour,” he says.

BUT THERE WAS little of Ahuja’s personal life, he says, apart from photographs, conversations with those who trained with him, and accounts from his wife. “There was a lot of fear,” says Siddharth, of “not doing the right thing. I had terrible imposter syn­drome.” There was no video recordings, no audio tapes, though he used to sing, and loved Shah Rukh Khan, adds Sid­dharth, which explains the Baazigar song he dances to with Amrita Bagchi, who plays Alka Ahuja on screen. “So I attempted a process of discovery, transporting myself to the places he had been,” the actor says.

His process is simple, he says. “I take all my roles very seriously because I am playing a person I am not. So I have to find a path between myself and the charac­ter. Otherwise it will be me in costume, which I have never done. The idea of be­ing someone who has worn the uniform with such incredible pride is intimidat­ing. We had a lot of handholding by the Indian Air Force. I made sure I understood the weight of the uniform. I did a lot of military research because I had very little of his personal life. I could only do a spiritual prep. I had a lot of photographs of him so I spent a lot of time with those. I built him from an ether state.”

He also had help from Alka Ahuja. “I asked her to send me his shoelaces because I wanted a part of him with me all the time. She went one step further and sent me her husband’s wings, which I wore. It was a lot of fear. I was afraid of do­ing the wrong thing. It was a minefield,” he recalls. “But she has adopted me and made me part of her family. It’s become way bigger than us,” he adds. “I’ve got calls from decorated war heroes, senior generals, air marshals, admirals,” he says. There have been memes featuring the young cast, a series of interviews, and lots of individual acclaim.

Even as he enjoys the acclaim coming his way for playing Ahuja, and talks about his forthcoming projects—Netflix’s Lust Stories 3 with Vishal Bhardwaj , Siddharth is gearing up for his fifth home produc­tion, his most ambitious yet. He is also shooting two films in Tamil.

Like a lot of actors, Siddharth has spent much of his life between cultures, which clearly gives him both a fluency and a flexibility that is the life breath of actors. Born in Chennai, he moved to Delhi and studied at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and Kirori Mal College. He studied theatre under the great Kewal Arora. “I take a bit of Delhi with me wherever I go. I went back to my college recently, and met my theatre professor Kewal Arora, my earliest mentor. It was fantastic.”

Flying for his country was never a boyhood dream. “I’ve always looked at them from a distance with awe. It’s like when you watch an Olympic athlete from afar. You know you don’t have what it takes to be one,” he says. “I don’t have the physical and mental make up to be a soldier. I have fought my battles but only as an artist.”

HIS ITINERANT NATURE remains as it is. “I am an actor, producer, singer who lives and works out of Chennai. Whenever I am not working I am around my beautiful wife who lives in Mumbai. And when I am working in Mumbai, I am in Mum­bai,” he says of actor Aditi Rao Hydari, whom he married in 2024. “We are living the dream where each of us was living out of a suitcase which is now a home in a different city. We have homes in Chen­nai, where my parents live, Mumbai, and Hyderabad where her mom lives. I was in New York for six months last year,” he says. “And now I have a home in Delhi too, where Alka Ahuja lives.”

Film critic Sreedhar Pillai says Siddharth works hard and his choice of scripts has mostly been perfect. “He understands local nuances and can speak in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and insists on dubbing in his own voice. Sid also un­derstands filmmaking, after working as assistant to stalwarts like Mani Ratnam. Most importantly, he is passionate about his work,” he adds.

He takes his cinema seriously but not himself seriously which makes him unusual when the lowest common denominators are box office numbers, social media fame and red carpet ap­pearances. A bit old school, he remains effortlessly cool, as much in demand on the catwalk with his wife, as he is with quality filmmakers.