Rajkummar Rao is widely regarded as one of the finest actors to be working in the Hindi film industry. The actor made his debut with a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance in Ram Gopal Verma’s ‘Rann’ and then, featured as a leading man in the Dibakar Banerjee directed ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha’. Over the years, the actor has delivered superlative performances in films like ‘Kai Po Che’, ‘Trapped’, ‘Newton’, ‘Stree’, ‘Hum Do Hamare Do’ and ‘Badhaai Do’, among others.
Rajkummar, who was studying acting at the Film and Television Institute of India or FTII, made brief appearances in a few music videos before foraying into films. While many know about his brief cameo in Sona Mohapatra’s ‘Aaja Ve’, not many are aware that he featured in another music video the same year.
In the year 2006, the band Euphoria, which is front-lined by its lead vocalist and founder Palash Sen, came out with an album titled ‘Mehfuz’. The era of non-film albums had, thankfully, not ended by then. ‘Mehfuz’ was released by Saregama and had as many as 11 original tracks. A couple of songs on the album were written by Gulzar. Music videos were made out of many of the songs in the album and one of those music videos featured Rajkummar Rao.
The actor was seen briefly in the music video of ‘Rab Jaane’, an immersive melody with a philosophical bent to it. Apart from featuring Palash Sen and the other band members of Euphoria, the video also had Vaishali Desai in it. Vaishali, who was a model then, also featured prominently in the music videos of ‘Mehfuz’ and ‘Sohneya’, two other songs from the album. Vaishali went on to make her film debut opposite Jackky Bhagnani three years later in ‘Kal Kissne Dekha’.
In the music video, Rajkummar can be seen playing a young man playing cricket. One sees him praying fervently and wishing to hit a good shot. In the video, he shares the frame with Palash. He can be seen at the 0:55 mark in the video. Given the release date of the video and album, Rajkummar must have shot this video while he was still an acting student at FTII. The makers, perhaps, wanted to source out actors from the institute for this video.
Link to Rab Jaane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKViWjXtN58