SHAH’S SEASON: Naseeruddin Shah and (below) a poster of The Dirty Picture

It just takes a simple text message to get an appointment with Naseeruddin Shah. And that’s saying something — for the actor is on every film poster that catches your eye. With six back-to-back releases, it seems as if a mini film festival is running across the country to honour a man for all seasons.

Shah has never had so many releases at the same time. That Girl in Yellow Boots, released earlier this month, is being followed by The Blueberry Hunt, Michael, 4084, Chargesheet, The Dirty Picture and Maximum.

“These roles are so drastically different that it does seem like I have taken a conscious decision to do different kinds of roles. But I have merely taken up the roles I was offered. I did refuse Shoaib Mansoor’s Bol because I was shooting for The Blueberry Hunt,” says Shah, 61.

Right now he is in a police uniform — ready to shoot (pun unintended) for the role of an encounter cop in Kabeer Kaushik’s Maximum. The Blueberry Hunt — which is up next on the marquee — has him sport a Rastafarian look. With his grey dreadlocks, he looks good enough to make his fans swoon over him — as they did when he first made his mark as a 25-year-old with Nishant in 1975.

Yet Shah never thought he’d be a hero. “When I saw actors like Asrani and others from FTII get into films, I was aiming for that slot,” he says, referring to the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, where he was a student. “But fate deemed otherwise.”

Director Shyam Benegal snapped up the lean and mean actor hungry for roles, casting him in his first three films. “Shyam saw something in me and gave me work,” he says. But before that he had featured in a mainstream film called Sunaina with Rameshwari.

“The film flopped and people did not think I was a good mainstream hero. I did want to be one. It is not that I only wanted to do art movies. I wanted to do all kinds of movies,” he says. “Even if I had got the role of the third dead body in a mainstream film I would have done it,” he guffaws.

But when Shah got his major mainstream break in 1989 — yodelling in Tridev with girls and guns — the knives were out. “Art filmmakers, some co-actors and the media went out to slaughter me as if I had betrayed them and the cause of art cinema. I was only doing those films because I was not getting other roles. Why didn’t they say all that when I was acting in flop movies? Just because I gave a hit in a mainstream film, there was a problem,” he says.

“There was no money in the other films I did. How much can one be paid for a film like Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai which itself was made in Rs 3.5 lakh,” fumes the man who was Albert Pinto in the 1980 Saeed Mirza film.

The knives were out literally too. He recalls how an old colleague from the National School of Drama (NSD), where Shah was a student, stabbed him in a hotel. “Jaspal and I were doing similar roles and we were a team at NSD. At FTII it was a different ball game and we played different characters. And then I got into films. For some reason he believed that all the roles I was getting were meant for him and that I was the imposter,” he says.

Shah says he withdrew the police case against him, and Jaspal was released from jail. “But the drugs that we used to consume those days got to him. We did a lot of drugs at NSD and FTII in those days. I was lucky enough to get out of it. He wasn’t — even though he was as good an actor as Om (Puri) and I,” sighs Shah.

And that’s high praise, for the actor has played a spectrum of roles — from the sightless Anirudh Parmar in Sparsh in 1980 to Michael who loses his vision in Anurag Kashyap’s film of the same name which premiers at the Toronto film festival. “Michael is a lovely film. It has a wonderful script and a great team behind it,” he says, and then promptly recalls A Wednesday, a 2008 film in which he plays an ordinary man tired of terrorism. “This was the only film in which I did not have to change even one dialogue. Director Neeraj Pandey was very sure what he wanted from the film and everything was in place,” beams Shah.

One of his co-stars he has had fun with was Tipu — an Alsatian — in The Blueberry Hunt. “Tipu was called Slumdog by director Anup Kurian in the script. I changed it to Kuttappan Patti (dog, in Malayalam), because I thought it was a nice name. Arundhati Roy used to have a dog at her place by that name,” reminisces Shah. “Kuttappan Patti even jumped into the water right behind me loyally when I had to get into the water for a scene. He is a star down South,” says Shah fondly.

Shah has also played the role of a Parsi in many films — including Pestonjee, Being Cyrus, Parzania, Encounter: The Killing and Aghaat. “The Parsis call me Naseeru Dinshaw for playing a Parsi in so many films. I think they should make me an honorary Parsi,” he laughs again.

Shah is now awaiting Milan Luthria’s The Dirty Picture in which he plays a negative role. “It is a very interesting film. The trailer does not tell you what the real film is all about. They have paid a tribute to Telugu cinema through the film as well.”

And even as Shah awaits his releases, he is happy about the fact that his theatre is also travelling. “I will be going to Calcutta in November with two of my plays — George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Herman Wouk’s Caine Mutiny Court Martial. We will have some four shows there. And in the meantime I hope all my films release this year,” he says.