Circa 2007. Akshaye Khanna has firmly stepped into the spotlight with a cutting-edge performance in Gandhi My Father. Endowed with a sculpted face and a smile that brings back memories of his own father, Vinod Khanna, the boy who grew up dreaming big in 70 mm is now a cool dude himself. When he joined the industry though, his Westernised image and stylised accents seemed to inhibit his choice of roles.

Few can forget his first emergence as a sensitive performer in Taal and later, Dil Chahta Hai – a movie that served to underscore Khanna’s status as an icon for Gen Next. Here was an actor who years later joked unselfconsciously about his hair on a TV talk show. How much cooler could one expect him to get?

Over the last 10 years, many Khanna-watchers had continued to feel that there was an underlying fountainhead of searing talent waiting to be tapped. Glimpses had been seen in flicks like Humraaz, 36 China Town, Salaam-E -Ishq and Naqaab.

For sheer choice of role and willingness to do something different as Harilal Gandhi, the 32-year-old needs to be applauded for Gandhi My Father. An inevitable question pops up. Is the intensity he has shown in the film due to his own relationship with an absentee father in his growing up years? Earlier, in an interview with Verve he had provided an insight into his relationship with Khanna Sr: “Friends in school must have known my father was an actor but we were never made to feel conscious about it, perhaps, because he wasn’t there. I was too young to really feel his absence….” Whatever the cause, the film is bound to give us a reason for wanting to see more of the actor on the silver screen.