Irrfan Khan has a problem — Bollywood doesn’t quite know what to do with him. He’s just bagged the National Award for best actor for his film Paan Singh Tomar, but is being flooded with “father” roles. After Life of Pi, everybody wants him to play the role of a dad.

Despite Bollywood’s attempts to “label” him, Irrfan’s glad he played the middle-aged Pi in the 2012 Oscar-winning film. Just as he’s happy that the government has recognised him for a biopic on the life of an athlete-turned-dacoit. “Paan Singh was a seven-time national steeplechase champion and had won many medals in his lifetime. But this was his first recognition after death, and when I went up to the stage to receive the award, I could feel him by my side,” Irrfan says.

The recent visit to the capital — for the National Award — was a homecoming for Irrfan whose own journey in show business started at the National School of Drama (NSD) in the Eighties. When he joined the institute no one knew he nurtured dreams of becoming an actor. “I told everyone that I was going for training so I could teach somewhere,” he says.

Irrfan grew up in Jaipur, but his roots are in Tonk, a village in Rajasthan, where dreamers like Inderjeet, his character in this year’s hit sequel, Sahib Biwi Aur Gangster 2, spend their lives seeped in Urdu couplets. “There’s romance in the air there. These guys have little money, yet they’re content,” he smiles.

There’s romance in Irrfan as well. He was seven when he threw a flower at a little girl. She tossed it back with a coy smile, and remains enshrined in his heart. Crooning a line from a duet in Didi, a 1959 film — Tum mujhe bhool bhi jao to yeh haq hai tumko, meri baat aur hai maine to mohabbat ki hai — he stresses that he’s a “die-hard romantic”. And that was why enacting the lovelorn gangster in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s socio-politico drama was so satisfying.

“That’s also why I chose to play Chitrangada Singh’s silent lover in another gangster movie, Yeh Saali Zindagi, even though director Sudhir Mishra offered me a more dramatic part,” he adds, confessing to being a modern-day Walter Raleigh who once carried a lady’s sandal in his hands when it snapped during a stroll. “I didn’t think it was romantic, but she keeps reminding me about it,” he chuckles.

I t was this trait that prompted director Mira Nair to cast him as a mature lover in The Namesake (2007). She also forced him not to cut his hair, and allow his curls to grow. Suddenly he was “sexy” — a compliment he accepted with surprise. “We become actors to hear good things about ourselves,” he laughs.

But it wasn’t just his looks that fetched him rave reviews in the West; he was lauded more for his performances in films such as The Warrior (2001), Road to Ladakh (2003) and The Namesake. He also figured in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) — a role that he accepted only for the experience of working in a multi-million dollar franchise, he says.

But Bollywood is seemingly doing all that it can to typify the first Hindi film actor to star in two films that won the Academy Award for Best Director, Slumdog Millionaire and Life of Pi.

“It would have been easy to slot me as a villain after Haasil and Maqbool (2003), if I’d let them,” he says, adding that ever since Ang Lee’s film became popular across the world, he has been turning down offers to play a father.

But Pi, he adds, was different. Once, during a narration of the script, he broke down at the point where the tiger walks into the jungle without a backward glance. While shooting, the director wondered if he’d be able to cry again. “Everyone was stunned when it happened,” Irrfan reminisces, adding that the scene had to be re-shot again with another actor so he ended up crying three times for the same scene in three years.

The shot, not surprisingly, is one of Ang Lee’s favourite scenes. Irrfan is all praise for the director who took on the challenge of filming an impossible book and turned it into an unforgettable film. “At this year’s Oscars, I only wanted him to win and was delighted when he was adjudged Best Director.”

Irrfan himself had been a likely Oscar contender for his performance as Ashoke Ganguli, modelled on novelist Jhumpa Lahiri’s professor father, in The Namesake. “Getting the accent right was difficult, as Bengalis roll their ‘s’ and ‘r’,” sighs Irrfan whose wife, Sutapa Sikdar, is a Bengali. They met at the NSD and she scripted the TV serial that launched him, Banegi Apni Baat (1993).

After NSD, he did some TV roles, but it was Banegi Apni Baat, a long-running series, that marked him as a gifted actor. It led to the bigger screen, better roles, awards, rewards and red- carpet galas. He’s made his fourth appearance at Cannes with The Lunchbox, a film he has partly produced. It’s a love story revolving around Mumbai’s dabba service.

What did he have in his own dabba during his school days? “Parathas and sabzi. Ammi (mother) is a great cook and my lunch box was often raided. I coveted the lunch box of another boy for its mango pickle since achaar was the one thing I didn’t get at home,” he laughs.

At 50, there’s still a little of Pi in the actor who’s always waiting to break free of air-conditioned suites and studio lights and go home to Jaipur. “There I can sit out in the open and watch the clouds waft by,” he says. “Return to the world of dreamers and little princesses.”

But before that, he has to finish filming the action thriller D-Day, whose director Nikhil Advani also bagged a national award for his animation feature Delhi Safari (2012). D-Day is about an operation that takes RAW agents into Pakistan. It’s a topical subject considering cross-border infringements are making headlines every day. And though he insists he’s not a specialist in political affairs, the recent Chinese encroachment in Ladakh set alarm bells clanging in his head.

“We’re surrounded, yet we continue to sleep, diverted by our own political turmoil,” he sighs, afraid that the world is racing towards a big confrontation. “The problem is that we tend to forget history.”

Are South Block’s mandarins listening?