A sense of freedom filled the young college student as he tugged joyously on the kite string, making it soar above the terraces in the Nagpur skyline. He had just gathered all his courage and told his father he did not want to study commerce or chartered accountancy any longer.

I am not enjoying it, he said. His father’s response was simple. Ok, then don’t do it, he said.

Meaning what, asked the astonished son. Come tomorrow and start working with me, the father replied.

That’s how Rajkumar Hirani set off on the path to becoming a successful Hindi film director, with a short detour at the modest typing institute that his father Suresh Hirani ran.

That was over two decades ago. Today Hirani — “23 years and a few hundred months old”, he says in reply to a texted query about his age — is on the interview turnstile. Dressed in a snug brown T-shirt and blue jeans, with neatly coiffed hair, he has media appointments lined back to back in the run up to the release of his latest film 3 Idiots, which opened this week.

What was the least fun bit of making 3 Idiots? “I won’t tell you that,” says an alert Hirani. He readily gives us the most enjoyable part instead — editing.

“Editing is a meditative process. I enjoy it the most. I am not dealing with 200 people,” says Hirani, parked comfortably in the open cushioned sit-out at his constant producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s pristine office in Santa Cruz in Mumbai’s western suburbs. “For three months after the shooting I lock myself in the room and immerse myself in it,” Hirani says.

He didn’t know what editing was when he first applied to the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune. Like thousands of others, he wanted to study direction but the odds were very high. A student told him to try for editing instead, for it only had a handful of takers.

“What is editing,” Hirani remembers asking. Without knowing what it was, he successfully applied for the subject and went on to make a career as a film editor before launching into direction.

Hirani says he edits even while scripting. “I am constantly editing,” he stresses. As he shoots he keeps deleting extra words and pauses. “The joke among my actors is that I keep reducing their pauses,” he says, taking a dig at himself. But he has the last laugh — he has never had to cut a scene from any of his films. “Never,” he says.

That’s an astonishing feat considering he has made the peerless Munnabhai MBBS and Lagey Raho Munnabhai, with Munnabhai Chaley Amerika in the works.

But then, Hirani always knew what he wanted to do. While growing up in Nagpur, he had started doing theatre full time. “Nagpur was a very small town. There was no exposure to different kinds of films or world cinema. Only Manmohan Desai films,” he twinkles. So theatre it was — till he joined the FTII.

The grind began when he landed in Mumbai in 1988 after getting his degree in editing. He did all that aspiring actors and directors do in the city to survive — stayed as a paying guest and took on all kinds of work, of which there was not enough. He had learnt cinema but not video which was the hot button industry in the eighties. Hirani returned to the FTII, learnt video and joined Ekta Video for six months for Rs 1,200 a month.

He also got married — to Manjeet, a commercial pilot who avowedly would give up her husband before she gives up flying. “You will be shocked to know it’s an arranged marriage,” the moustachioed Hirani says genially. He admiringly describes her as “a toughie sardarni. Nothing bothers her.”

Not so her two brothers who were worried that their brother-in-law was into pirating videos in those days when videos were often hyphenated to piracy. “They would see me record from one tape to another and get worried,” Hirani laughs.

The sardar brothers could have spared themselves. Within a year Hirani was in demand as an editor, for television and films, and a few years later “drifted into” making ad films.

But the yearning to direct films persisted and he continued to write.

The passion for editing too came “thrusting back” when producer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra called him to edit Mission Kashmir nine years ago. “I knew Vinod from the time I had done promos for (his 1993 film) 1942, A Love Story. I was initially reluctant to edit Mission Kashmir but could not say no.” It turned out to be his most enjoyable film edit.

At that time Chopra was not producing films for other directors. But when Hirani approached him for an actor for the first film in the Munnabhai series, Chopra, delighted with the narration, offered to produce the film.

Hirani, who took 15 years to make his first film, sometimes despaired that he would never make one. His self belief returned when he wrote the script for Munnabhai MBBS.

“After the first film one knows one did right. I had a yardstick to go by with 3 Idiots. During the previous two films I had started keeping a small booklet of things to remember while making a film. It’s my bible!”

His involvement has grown with each successive film. His first draft for 3 Idiots was about three students but the story had no spine. The film was sparked by an idea that came to him while reading Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone.

“But by the time Abhijat (Pasiyat) and I finished writing the script it had a completely different story, with complex layering and two time spans — college and five years later.”

Hirani has strong views on issues that he believes in — a trait that he says stems from his father. “He is an honest and righteous man, who stands up for all kinds of things. Each of my films actually comes from personal experience.” His films deal with themes such as doctors and their lack of compassion, Gandhism and non-violence, and now the pursuit of excellence and eccentricity.

He has also inherited his sense of irreverence from his father who came from Pakistan as a 14-year-old. Suresh Hirani had lost his own father at a very early age. “He put himself through night school, earned and graduated. He is a very confident self-made man.”

When the young Rajkumar was in short pants, he went home trembling after listening to some ghost stories. Hirani packed Sheela, his wife, and their eldest son into his old second-hand Vauxhall car and drove some 40km out of Nagpur. The he yelled loudly for ghosts and made his son do the same. None materialised. His son returned convinced there were no ghosts. “I remember that night vividly,” narrates the storyteller.

“Someday I want to really talk about religion and blind faith. I explored astrologers, palmistry etcetra at length till I believed it was a scam. Even in 3 Idiots I take a dig at them,” scoffs Hirani.

One of the interesting aspects of 3 Idiots was its cast. The film features 44-year-old Aamir Khan and other 30-plus actors playing the eponymous 20-something undergrads. Why forty-plus heroes? As Hirani tells it, the film required four new people; the fourth character is a new actor in the film who was intentionally not publicised prior to release. Six months of auditions in Bombay, Pune and Delhi failed to yield a complementing set of four co-stars. “So we had to go back to actors who have a job to do. After all, someone dons make up and a white guy becomes Gandhi. Kamalhasan became a woman in Chachi 420. It’s all about acting,” insists Hirani.

Having taken his time to arrive, Hirani has not been galvanised into gathering speed. It’s still a ratio of three years, one movie. “Even in the Film Institute I didn’t think life would be so kind. In those days, when we students would have our drunken nights, we would swear we’d be content if we made just one film. Make one film, and kill ourselves.”

Instead, he enjoys the process. For him, joy is when unknown people come up and say, thank you for that film.

“I am not in a rush. Not here to make 100 films. For me, cinema is happiness.”

His new caller tune (earlier it was the Raj Kapoor refrain Jeena isi ka naam hai) trills his film’s score — All izzz welll. For Hirani, kite flying is here to stay.