A TV star as big as the film stars. But when the small screen was truly minuscule he took the plunge with the serial Wah Janab. 'It was a tough decision.

I, Viral Shah, found this video in my old collection. I still remember those days when I was a kid and every weekend used to sit near by TV watching the Doordarshan (had no other option those days) - few colourfull strips with a sharp whistling noise on the screen for a while and than this digital clock used to come up.

Ramayana and Mahabharat on sunday morning. Than Chandrakanta and Alif-laila on every monday evening at, Malgudy days. Shaktiman on Saturday noon. How can I forget these funny advertisement, which was being broadcast longer than the actual serial.

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Golden days of childhood. Missing those days.

THERE'S a pause, even with canned laughter. And it's in these pauses that a serial like Main is spawned. For the self. When a superstar like Shekhar Suman shifts orbit to blaze a trail all his own. And take a break from his stand-up comic routines to return to a few of his favourite things in all seriousness. 'With two years of Movers and Shakers I attained a certain image. Then one episode of Main changed everything.

In it I am deadpan, morbid, aggressive. People are accepting it. To have just one image is to be strait-jacketed,' muses this Baadshah of the tube. One who, industry sources estimate, at Rs 1 lakh per episode of M&S, Rs 50,000 to Rs 75,000 per episode of the three serials (Vilayati babu, Main and Hera Pheri) he's currently working on, would be toting around Rs 6.5 lakh to 7.25 lakh per week. Add up the weeks to a year, and he could be making as much as the Khan superstars, who charge upwards of Rs 2.5 crore per film. For long, he's had humour as his muse.

Now his bag of gags throws up uncharacteristic sobriety. For starters, he's cutting down his television commitment (apart from M&S) to three other serials, and not doing any comedy for two years. He's also reverting to his first love, theatre, by starting an academy with Om Katare in Mumbai for youth who, like him when he was young and green, fantasise about stage and ovation. There's also an album with Gulzar, reciting and singing his poetry. The only indulgence in all this abstinence from comedy is a David Dhawan film. Cartoons too, he'll have you know, are prone to catharsis.

Critics, who've revelled in reviling him, now wonder if Main is autobiographical. 'It is,' says Suman, 'about a superstar who starts believing he is god till he learns that he is terminally ill. A character ostensibly vicious, ruthless, mercenary. Who learns that it takes just one sneeze to realise that you are human.' In other words, it is not autobiographical. For Suman is accustomed to being racked by humbling sneezes.

But the character delineation, he lets on, is definitely drawn from personal happenings, rejections by people who were behaving like that 'only due to circumstances', humiliations, anger. 'I think the angst stems from the fact that I have suffered the same thing.' Having also been graced by death, losing his nine-year-old son Aayush (which ironically means 'long life') to a heart ailment. To laugh with and at the world to dam the tears. The anger had then been channelised, and has finally now run its course.

For long now he has been in a forgiving mood. And can boast perhaps not wrongly, that he is a very humble man. A secretary-less superstar at the receiver-end. 'I am more of a common man. I'm every man's man. Yet I'm not.' Decipher that.

Alok Nath was selected for the prime role of a freedom fighter.

Contradictions perhaps he's entitled to, being a man who's trekked the rough path up to the star spangle. For a youth from Bihar who levitated with a dream debut (co-starred with Rekha for Utsav, directed by Girish Karnad, produced by Shashi Kapoor) and continued his spree with Madhuri Dixit, Padmini Kolhapure, Juhi Chawla, Dimple Kapadia, he strangely subsided into a no-return limbo. As young father and husband, he swallowed humiliation for his designer wife Alka as she hawked clothes to boors, wondering why the dream soured. Wondering too, if his acting lessons at Delhi's Sri Ram Centre would enter into the history books that helped him graduate. But when the small screen was truly minuscule he took the plunge with the serial Wah Janab. 'It was a tough decision.