“I don’t like that word — celebrity,” Ahad Raza Mir had told me in my first detailed interview with him some time ago. This was when he was still basking in the success of his role in the hit drama Yaqeen Ka Safar. Now when we meet, he has several more hits to his credit. He has won quite a few awards, has a huge fan following, is seen in big budget TV commercials and is acting in two of the most popular dramas that are currently being broadcast on TV — the ISPR-backed Ehd-e-Wafa and Yeh Dil Mera (YDM), a thriller that has taken off with some riveting first few episodes.
He also got engaged to actress Sajal Aly, his co-star in the majority of the TV dramas that he has acted in so far. Ahad and Sajal are so well loved, individually as well as a couple, that there is an entire battalion of fans on social media who are completely dedicated to ‘Sahad’. The internet goes into a frenzy any time the two make a public appearance together and dramas featuring the two of them happily cash in on the romance by airing out their scenes in the promos. Ahad, irrefutably, is a celebrity and a very successful one.
This doesn’t mean that he has started to like the word. “I don’t have any aspiration to be known as a celebrity. I just want to be known as an actor,” he asserts to me again, as he had in that long-ago interview. “It’s all I want to do. But I now understand that the acting has to be balanced with being part of show business. I hate that. I feel like I’m at war with the prevalent ways of the industry. Why is there a need to constantly post on social media and have more followers? Why do so many of us feel the urge to float out behind-the-scenes [BTS] glimpses of the projects that we are working on? Why is there this constant need to attend awards shows and win awards?
Why are we not taking pleasure in our work?”
With two wildly popular serials currently on television, legions of fans and a recent celebrated engagement to one of Pakistan’s other rising stars, it seems Ahad Raza Mir’s time is at hand. But the only pleasure the actor wants to focus on is his work