Alia Bhatt's first double role

It’s just a music video. For now. But Alia Bhatt will soon do her first full-fledged double role in a feature film. In the music video of the song Ae zindagi gale laga le from Dear Zindagi, we get to see two Alia Bhatts, and one of them looks a lot like the Dear Zindagi director Gauri Shinde.

The video which has Alia singing Suresh Wadekar’s original song from the Kamal Haasan starrer Sadma, conceptualises the Alia character as being split into two halves. She is the glamorous Alia Bhatt dancing centrestage. She is also Shyra, the cinematographer character from Dear Zindagi. It is as Shyra in the music video that we see Alia imbibe Gauri Shinde’s traits.

“Alia is a keen observer. She would look at me shooting, take it all in,” says Gauri. Says Alia, “Gauri is my first female director….actually, my second. As a child, I was directed by Tanujaa Chandra in Sungharsh where I played Preity Zinta as a child. But that doesn’t count. I was too small to connect with my director. In Dear Zindagi Gauri and I hit it off .We were soon like sisters, exchanging notes on clothes, hair, etc.” The soul sisters will come together again shortly. And apparently this time it would be a double role for Alia, just like the one we see in the music video.“Alia has the rare ability to create new characters on screen — people we can’t recognise as being extensions of her personality,” says Gauri.