If you happen to sit next to Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra on a flight, you’ll be able to write a neat little biography of India’s legendary athlete Milkha Singh by the end of the journey. “I am telling his story to everyone I meet until I finally make the movie and tell it to everybody,” says the director of Rang De Basanti (RDB) and Delhi-6. Having spent almost two years researching for Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Mehra is now finalising actors and locations for the film.

The subject, clearly, excites the director-producer even though he looks quite like a peaceful ascetic at this moment, dressed as he is in a flowing white kurta and blue jeans. He has just finished his morning yoga, and is now sitting in his elegantly done up office in the Pali Hill area of Mumbai, not far from his house. The office is impressive with glass-mounted posters of his films, and national and international medals and certificates, mostly won for RDB, adorning the walls.

Except for a laptop on a table and framed pictures of his two children in one corner, a large screen TV standing on the floor and a cream-coloured sofa set, the room is bare. “This is where I generate ideas and discuss my films with actors and technicians before the shooting starts,” he says, settling down in a single-seater sofa.

I wonder if it’s some kind of a hideaway too. Is this where he sat, slumped into the same sofa, and wondered what went wrong with his last film Delhi-6?

“I went into hiding for a few months. I became some sort of a recluse, but this wasn’t the place where I was,” he says. “I was heartbroken after Delhi-6. I was angry with myself that I couldn’t convey the story. Maybe I rushed myself with the story.”

But haste is not something that you associate with Mehra, 47. Whether it is the air of serenity that his bearded face reflects, his languid way of speaking, his unkempt look or his philosophical take on just about everything, he comes out as somebody who sets his own pace.

Yet life hasn’t been without its share of bumps and bruises for Mehra, who grew up in a lower middle class home in Delhi. His father worked in a city hotel. But Mehra was a state-level swimmer, which won him a seat in the much sought after Shri Ram College of Commerce in Delhi in the early Eighties.

His first day in college was memorable. Students were asked to introduce themselves — and reel out their school-leaving marks — to a professor.

“While everyone else had over 90 per cent marks, I had 56.6,” says Mehra. “The professor looked shocked and said it was because of students like me that the reputation of the college had been dented. I had tears in my eyes,” Mehra recalls. He never attended the professor’s class again.

While his classmates joined management institutes and big companies after college, he started as a salesman for Eureka Forbes vacuum cleaners in Delhi, the last resort of a jobless youth in the city. He was paid Rs 415 a month.

But Mehra was always good at one thing — something that he calls “game changing”. When other salesmen went from house to house convincing suspicious housewives about the benefits of their vacuum cleaners, Mehra approached hospitals and airports. “I used to sell 20 to 30 machines in one go, just like that,” he says, snapping his fingers.

It was no different when he shifted base to Mumbai — another bit of “game-changing” — after falling in love with advertising. He started shooting television ads for Indian companies and multinational giants then entering India. And the result was recognition as one of India’s leading ad film directors and a clutch of Indian and international awards.

“No matter what you do, if you are not raising the bar and are content at doing what is normal, you shouldn’t be in it,” he says. He looks intently at me and adds: “The same applies to you.” I start taking down notes feverishly.

Raising the bar for him in the late Nineties meant the big screen. “The enormity, along with the romance and adventure of making a feature film, was too hard to resist. It was a dark cave for me, but I grasped Amitji’s hand to take me through it,” he says, referring to Amitabh Bachchan who starred in his debut film Aks –The Reflection in 2001.

The highly stylised film with a story that completely confused the audience was a disaster. But for Mehra it was more than a film.

“Aks was a philosophy. I rather tried to push my philosophy and of course it was highly stylised because I was coming out of advertising. But after Aks I realised that I could make movies and work with actors,” he adds.

He went on an overdrive and devoured books on screenplay and studied films of masters such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa and Indian greats including Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt and V. Shantaram. And, of course, there was always his all-time favourite: “There is only one Ritwik Ghatak. He was an aberration. He was a genius and in a league of his own. He was probably Leonardo Vinci in his previous life.”

Then came RDB in 2006, his most acclaimed film so far with a powerful social and political message. “Everything happens to me at the subconscious level. I don’t have to go in search (of anything). Socio-political conditions affect me very deeply. Otherwise why should issues such as patriotism, riots and religion form subjects in our films when there are better topics and stories? Even Delhi-6 had a socio-political message but I couldn’t tell the story entertainingly,” he says with a smile.

But if Mehra has been lucky on one front, it’s been with actors. His films have featured the crème-de-la-crème of Bollywood: from Bachchan in Aks to Aamir Khan in RDB, and stalwarts such as Waheeda Rahman, Om Puri, and Rishi Kapoor in his last film. “While Amitji never interferes once he is convinced about the script, it is a little different with Aamir. He conducts workshops after he reads the screenplay and everything is sorted out at that stage,” he says.

Aamir Khan, I point out, is known to direct directors. “I listen to everybody. But at the end of the day I do what I want to. Moreover they know that I work best when I am left alone,” he remarks, smiling again.

But among all the actors he has worked with, it is neither Bachchan nor Khan who has impressed him the most. The one who has caught his eye is newcomer Deepak Dobriyal, who features in his new production Teen Thay Bhai. “He is the Johnny Depp of Indian cinema — a complete actor with a great future. Look out for him.”

I go back to Milkha Singh. A biopic on a living person can lead to unexpected controversies. Doesn’t that worry him? “The script is with Mr Milkha Singh,” he says and pauses — implying that if the sprinter is okay with it, there should be no problems. What he doesn’t agree with is the word biopic. “It’s not a biopic. It’s a film inspired by his life and about the period. For me the story of Milkha Singh is about a man whose parents were massacred in the Partition riots. It’s about a man who had nothing but a pair of legs. Look at what he achieved with them. I tell a story only if I have a point of view and I have one and I am dying to say it.”

Indeed, each of his films has a new point of view. “I hate getting formulaic,” he explains. “I think that is one of the problems plaguing the Indian film industry. We are not visionaries, we just follow others rather than leading from the front and looking beyond the horizon,” he says, drawing an arc in the air with his fingers.

Isn’t he being a bit alarmist? After all, India produces the largest number of films in the world. “Let us accept it, yaar. The only reason our cinema works is that we have such a huge population. Come on, dancing around trees cannot go on forever. There is better stuff out there and Hollywood is providing us with that,” he says, and belts out the names of Hollywood hits that have fared better than Bollywood films in India. “The Indian film industry is in desperate need of its own visionaries such as (N.R.) Narayan Murthy and Ratan Tata. Otherwise we are doomed.”

And to ensure that he practises what he preaches, Mehra has now turned producer to encourage different kinds of cinema. Teen Thay Bhai will be released next month and stars Om Puri again and Shreyas Talpade. “It’s a very small step, but with a very big heart. I hope we learn from here. One thing is for sure: instead of chasing money, we will chase excellence. That has always been our endeavour,” he says.

Has he finally found his calling in cinema? I don’t expect a formulaic answer and it isn’t one. “I still don’t know. I might become a mountaineer or a dive instructor one day. I love these things. Or maybe I’ll open a film studio or something like that. Have I found my calling? Maybe, maybe not. I have so much to do, but I don’t know about tomorrow,” he says. The story, clearly, is still to unfurl.