Vasan Bala’s Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota is the melting pot of pop culture references for the kids growing up during the 80s and the 90s. A film, where the protagonist learns about the world through VHS Tapes, it’s only natural for a director to slip in every possible hat-tip into it. And therefore, it was only natural that when we chatted up the film’s director (Vasan Bala) along with his two actors (Abhimanyu Dassani and Gulshan Devaiah), we would take them up on their knowledge of the most popular references between the ’80s and ’00s.
While both Abhimanyu Dassani and Gulshan Devaiah started of the scoring with answers to ‘the five elements that make Captain planet’ and ‘What planet is Sabu from?’, after a point it was difficult to catch up with director Vasan Bala. Knowing everything from the name of a fictitious club invented by Shah Rukh Khan’s character in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa to Naseeruddin Shah’s screen name in Rajiv Rai’s Mohra, Bala was untouchable in most of the questions.
It was a lot of fun, watching all three of them wrack their brains to come up with an answer. The director even more so, because it was visible that he cared more about getting it right. After all, he wrote all the references into the script of Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota. It was surely amusing to see him feel ‘some’ pain, when he didn’t get an answer right.
