Ranbir Kapoor in RajNeeti | Ranbir Kapoor plays a mixture of Rajiv Gandhi and Don Corleone in Rajneeti.

Ranbir Kapoor in RajNeeti | Ranbir Kapoor plays a mixture of Rajiv Gandhi and Don Corleone in Rajneeti.

Ranbir Kapoor plays an  NRI forced to return home to take  over the family business(in this case, politics) . Sounds familiar? Abhishek Bachchan  played a  similar role in Ram Gopal  Varma's Sarkar.

And both  characters are  inspired  by Al Pacino's Don Corleone in Francis Coppla's The  Godfather. Ranbir of course plays a mixture  of  Rajiv Gandhi and  Don Corleone  in  Rajneeti.

 And as coincidence would have it both Abhishek and  Ranbir had Katrina as their co-star, but with a  difference. In Sarkar Katrina's anglicized  voice   had to be dubbed although  she played an NRI and could've easily  used her accented voice  for the character. In Rajneeti  Katrina gives long speeches in shudh Hindi all in her own  voice.

  Katrina Kaif's two-minute   speech  in front  of   a 10,000-strong  attentive public   at  a  public rally in Bhopal  for Rajneeti , has  whetted Ranbir Kapoor's appetite for getting right  the  speeches that need  he needs to deliver  for Prakash Jha's film when he  starts shooting  in August.

There's just one  hitch. Ranbir  doesn't need  to learn shuddh hindi , like Katrina did.  He already knows  that.  He   needs to cultivate an  accent to sound like an America-returned Delhi boy who suddenly needs to go from monosyllabic  rashtra bhasha to full-speeches.

 Prakash Jha has  planned  intense  reading and speech therapy  sessions for Ranbir for him to    get  the  accented   Hindustani right.

To  play  a Harvard –educated US-based NRI who must  suddenly  return home to  look after his  mother's  political empire Ranbir Kapoor ina role that Al Pacino  would have liked to play,   is  not just  all set  to  start shooting, he's raring to  go.

Ranbir  won't play  the  reluctant politician in  the usual khadi kurta-pyjama  dress code. "Ranbir will be  very trendily  dressed. He plays a young man  of   today," informs the  director.

Apparently the character  is  a mix of Rajiv Ganghi and Michael Corloene from  Francis  Ford Coppola's The  Godfather.

 Ranbir who joins the  cast in August has been regularly calling and  talking  to  the  the entire cast in Bhopal.

Says  Prakash affectionately,  "He even  offered  to leave  whatever he  was doing and  join us  in Bhopal  although his shooting starts  next month. I remember one day Ajay, Nana, Arjun, Manoj  were  working  together and missing Ranbir. So in the evening we got together in my hotel room and called him. Ranbir spoke  to   each of  us  individually. He wanted  to   leave  everything  in Mumbai and  join  us Bhopal."

Prakash starts workshops   with Ranbir after the Lok Sabha elections.

Says  Prakash, "Ranbir is  so  excited about his look , dialogues.  He needs to play a character  who  defines democracy  in  today's world.  I  wouldn't  describe it  as a multi-starrer.  It's a multi-actor film.Katrina  Kaif is such a revelation. She was so nervous  giving a speech in front of 10,000 people. After she gave her speech I hugged her on stage and  shouted out to the  junta, 'Bhopal  ka ticket de de kya?' As for Naseer if I hadn't worked with him I  wouldn't have been a complete filmmaker."