Emerging from Old Delhi, he joined the Chingari theatre troupe in 1983 before moving to Pune to study at the Film and Television Institute of India two years later. His screen debut arrived in Kumar Shahani's parallel-cinema piece Khayal Gatha (1989), and when roles proved scarce in the 1990s he turned to writing and directing short films, culminating in his first feature, Private Detective: Two P…