The Ranbir Fan

For almost a year, she’s been standing outside his home daily for hours

It’s 4 pm and the Café Coffee Day at Carter Road, Bandra, is just about filling up. Sapna Kamdar orders a cappuccino, sits back and gives us a curious look. “Why do you want to interview me?” she asks. Sapna has a unique calling in life—she is actor Ranbir Kapoor’s biggest fan.

“I am a different fan,” she says hesitantly. She hasn’t even watched all his movies—“Just Rockstar and Bachna Ae Haseeno.” But what Sapna does do is make the trip from her home in Wadala to Bandra every day, just to stand outside his home, Krishna Raj, for hours on end. And she’s been doing it for close to eight to nine months.

Why does she do it? “Obviously, to meet him. Even the guards have stopped asking me why I am there now.”  The actor did stop and meet her once. He made polite chit chat and had a photograph taken, she says, but they still need to meet properly. Asked what she would ask him when they meet again, she replies sardonically, “Why would I tell you that? It’s personal.”

Sapna belongs to a Gujarati family, and lives with her parents, who are both retired now. She says she is an MBA and has done her teacher’s training as well (but she didn’t enjoy teaching pre-schoolers), but gave it all up for acting. She has no acting experience, except a show on a channel she doesn’t remember, where she appeared in two episodes (“They never called me back after that”). She goes for auditions after checking them out in the newspaper, which she only reads twice a week.

As for her love for Ranbir, well, all she says is, “It’s a spiritual connection.” What does she mean by ‘spiritual connection’? She pauses. “It’s like a heart-to-heart connection,” she says finally.

Has she ever spotted him with a lady love? Doesn’t it hurt when she reads about his alleged link-ups in the tabloids? Her expression is one of disdain and amusement at our question, as if we haven’t understood anything she has said yet. “Why should I believe all that? It’s all gossip. I don’t trust rumours,” she says, and then she delivers a kicker, almost sarcastically, “After all, I am just a fan.”

adulationRanbir KapoorSapna Kamdar