Where is Ashish Vidyarthi nowadays?

For most of you who have seen Govind Nihlani’s Drohkaal, forgetting the act of Ashish Vidyarthi as ‘Bhadra’ is just not possible. Such was the intensity of his performance in the movie that it brought him a National Award in the Best Supporting Actor category and made him stand out, even with the presence of two other stalwarts (Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah) in the movie. But of late, Ashish Vidyarthi has disappeared from the commercial Bollywood circuit. Why do you think we don’t see much of this very talented actor nowadays in Hindi movies?

In Seventies era, there was a good guy and a bad guy in our movies. This is the concept that made us take notice of the acting prowess of actors like Pran, Premnath, Prem Chopra, Ajit, Amjad Khan, Amrish Puri and many other bad guys whom we to date cherish with their screen names. If it was not for them, who would memorize Gabbar, Mogambo or Teja?

But for the past twenty years, if we look at Hindi movies, the concept of ‘hero-villain’ has been slowly on the decline. Either the bad guy is played by our Hero himself or there is no bad guy in today’s films. When was the last time you saw a good guy and bad guy clash in Hindi films before ‘Dabanng’? It is very tough to memorize a credible character that was written for a villain of late.

But one industry’s loss has been the gain of several others’ down South. For the past 11 years Ashish Vidyarthi has been busy with his South cinema, and in fact he’s had the opportunity to work with nearly all the super stars down South and has been a quintessential part of several blockbuster hits.

According to Ashish’s PR, Ashish Vidyarthi is more plan at doing roles that will bring out more variations in him than what we already recognize him for. Though we got to see him in the critically acclaimed ‘Red Alert’ last year, it was not a commercial success and very few people did bystander the talent of this man on-screen. Come next year, we will be privileged to see Ashish in the Ranbir Kapoor starrer ‘Barfi’.

Hope Bollywood can come out with some interesting characters for this enormously talented actor before they lose it all out to the South and other languages!