Had it not been for the easy bonhomie between boys and girls at the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi, the Hindi film industry might have missed out on one of its finest new directors. Had it not been for a casual visit to NSD, Paan Singh Tomar — the critically acclaimed film on an athlete-turned-dacoit — may never have been made.

But life’s full of interesting turns. When Tigmanshu Dhulia, the film’s director, was growing up in Allahabad, the superfast Prayagraj Express — running between his city and Delhi — had just started. “Suddenly Delhi became closer for us and I decided to visit the capital,” he recalls.

Till then, Dhulia had no particular career in mind and was toying with the idea of studying hotel management. But since he had been active in theatre, he decided to drop in at the NSD campus.

“Then I saw the girls smoking outside the campus without a care and I knew that this was the place of my dreams,” he says, lighting a cigarette himself.

A play by two NSD students — one went on to be called Irrfan in Bollywood, and the other made a name as Mita Vashisht — was being staged then, and Dhulia recalls he was mesmerised by it. So he sat for the NSD entrance test, was placed on the merit list and went on to win a scholarship. His only regret was he couldn’t study direction. “They put me in the acting course as there were only two of us who had opted for direction,” Dhulia says.

Dhulia wasn’t greatly interested in acting, and remembers that a play he was in had a disastrous opening. “I knew I was a bad actor but the casting director chose me because of my dialogue delivery. He forgot that since I was from Allahabad, diction and dialogues could never be a problem for me.”

But, as we said, life’s full of interesting turns. Today Dhulia is acting once again. He plays a villain in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs Of Wasseypur, a crime thriller starring Manoj Bajpai. “I don’t know what Anurag saw in me. But since there was no pressure to perform I just played my age.”

The man whom the industry has dubbed a “political thriller specialist” has experienced almost every aspect of filmmaking. In his final year at NSD, his design professor, who was helping director Ketan Mehta for the film Sardar, asked him to be his assistant. Then he was the chief assistant for Pradip Kishen’s Electric Moon. In 1990, he moved to Mumbai where he got his next big break as a casting director and assistant for Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen. He went on to write the dialogues for Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se and the screenplay and dialogues for ABCL’s Tere Mere Sapne. He even wrote and directed several short films and series for television channels.

But it’s not been an easy journey. His first directorial venture, a 2003 political love story called Haasil, won him awards and recognition. But his 2004 venture Charas: A Joint Operation on the drug mafia failed miserably. Dhulia faced seven barren years before he could stage a comeback. First came Shagird, which didn’t make much of a splash. Then there was Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster — a 2011 film that rocked. In 2012, with Paan Singh Tomar — touted as one of the best films of recent years — he is once again back in action.

And because action — the word that defines cinema — eluded Dhulia for so many years, he knows what its absence means. He missed it so much that he named his pet dog Action. “Those seven years, he was the only one who responded to my call of Action,” he says with a wry smile. “Seven years is a long time, but because of Haasil the regional media remembered me. Had I made something frivolous, people would have forgotten me,” he adds.

The seven-year hiatus saw some bad decisions and a spell of bad luck. Some projects fell through and some were not worth the effort. Dhulia reasons that he had taken up all kinds of work in haste because he had married young (to his sweetheart from Allahabad), and had a 13-year-old daughter. “I had to earn money.”

The director’s matter-of-fact way of speaking is reflected in his frill-less cinema. His office is equally unassuming. We are sitting in a cramped room in a small house in Mumbai’s Andheri. Dressed in denims and a loose cotton shirt, Dhulia looks more like a government employee than a filmmaker. There are no flashy gold bracelets, chains or even rings to ward off the evil eye — signs that mark success in the industry. He doesn’t even wear a wrist watch. He speaks softly, and has an endearing self-deprecatory air.

But his passion for cinema is an abiding one — as the huge posters on the wall from films such as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Bullitt and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid indicate. The poster of The Beatles is possibly a tribute to his rock band days with his friend from school, Amit Saigal, the late founder of the music magazine Rock Street Journal.

Dhulia’s past may be eclectic. But for the present, he will be known as the man behind Paan Singh Tomar.

The idea for the film first struck him when he read about the outlaw in Sunday magazine in 1991. “It was on the cover, a painted picture of him along with Phoolan Devi. The article was primarily on the dacoit queen with bits written about Paan Singh. It struck me then that this was a subject that needed to be made into a film.”

It took him almost two decades to find a production house to back his project. “I used to go to everyone with this subject. Irrfan has known since then that I wanted to make this movie,” he laughs. “Nobody was ready to fund my research. Sadly, unlike Hollywood, we have no concept of research.”

Eventually UTV Spotboy — a production house that makes niche films — agreed to back the project in 2009. Dhulia reached Paan Singh’s village Morena in Madhya Pradesh and traced his family, army colleagues, fellow athletes, coach and gang members. “Everyone had only good words for him. I met an old man who had once been abducted by Paan Singh. Even he had only nice things to say about him,” he says.

“I am glad I waited this long,” he adds. “This is a movie which has managed to grab eyeballs without a Chammak Challo or an SRK,” says the 44-year-old director about the biopic which cost less than Rs 8 crore (including publicity costs), but grossed around Rs 16 crore in domestic box office collections in its first three weeks.

The filmmaker has been a bit of a rebel himself. The youngest of three siblings, he was always different from his brothers. When his eldest brother joined the Navy, he strummed the guitar. When his elder brother studied law (he is now a judge in Uttarakhand), he was staging plays in Gorakhpur as a member of the pro-Left Progressive Students’ Organisation. It displeased his father, a judge in the Allahabad High Court, and his mother, a professor of Sanskrit. “My mother forced me to learn typing and stenography so that I could at least be a clerk in a government office or a munim (assistant) to my lawyer brother,” he laughs.

The knowledge of typing hasn’t helped much — Dhulia likes to write his scripts on paper. “And often an entire day is spent just doodling,” he chuckles. “I am a very lazy writer. But then I know I write very well,” he adds.

What he has problems with is directing others’ scripts. And he avoids working with big stars. “They come with a baggage and a whole battalion. I can’t handle that much pressure.”

He has other grouses too with the film industry. “Many of the filmmakers are boys from Mumbai who have seen Switzerland but not seen the real India,” he says. “But the good thing is that today their cinema and our cinema can co-exist.”

His new projects are a love story titled Milan Talkies, a political gangster story Jay Ramji and a sequel to Saheb Biwi aur Gangster. “Then I have two unfinished works — a spiritual thriller titled The Killing of a Porn Filmmaker and a period film set in 1857 titled Ghulami, which is my best script till date.”

By now he is smoking his fifth cigarette. People are waiting to meet him, but Dhulia has gone back to Allahabad, where he grew up watching and idolising films by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Shyam Benegal and Martin Scorsese — and of Amitabh Bachchan.

He narrates an incident where he was lathicharged because he refused to leave the cinema hall after a show. “I was told the opening credits of Shaan were not to be missed. But I’d reached late and missed the beginning. So after the show was over, I stayed back in the hall for the next show to watch the credits. The policemen chased me with lathis but even while I was running away, I was watching the opening credits,” he laughs.

As we end our chat, a stray dog walks into the room. “I adopted her from the street. She is Sahiba,” he says, and smiles. Clearly, Dhulia doesn’t need to name anyone Action any more.