Rang De Basanti — when Atul Kulkarni called it one of his favourites
The actor who played Laxman Pandey and Ram Prasad Bismil found this edit on YouTube, shared it, and said thank you. Here's the story.
On November 26, 2025, I woke up to a notification I genuinely never expected. Atul Kulkarni — the actor who played Laxman Pandey and Ram Prasad Bismil in Rang De Basanti — had shared my edit on his YouTube community tab with three words: "One of my favourites!"
He then reposted my tweet about it on X. In the comments section of his YouTube post, he replied directly to me: "Thank you so much for making it."
Later that same day, I reposted the edit on Instagram as a collab post with @atulkulkarni_official — meaning the video appeared on both our profiles simultaneously. The caption read: "Now that it's shared by @atulkulkarni_official — here's my Rang De Basanti Lakshman Pandey edit from Covid." The post reached 4,443 accounts, got 216 likes and 6,756 views — 94.6% from people who didn't follow me. Atul's share drove the entire thing.
The man who brought Laxman Pandey to life — one of the most quietly devastating character arcs in Indian cinema — had seen my edit, remembered it, and taken the time to say thank you.
"Waking up to @atul_kulkarni sharing my Rang De Basanti Lakshman Pandey edit was NOT on my 2025 bingo card."
— @lostintrovert_ on X, November 26, 2025About the edit
This video is a character study of Laxman Pandey — the Hindu nationalist who begins the film as the group's ideological opposite and ends it as one of its most heartbreaking figures. The edit traces the arc of his transformation: from someone defined entirely by his ideology to someone who learns, too late, what it means to die for something real rather than something abstract.
Atul Kulkarni's performance in Rang De Basanti is one of the most underappreciated in the film. In a cast that included Aamir Khan, Siddharth, Sharman Joshi, and Kunal Kapoor, Kulkarni's Laxman Pandey was the one who had the furthest to travel — and he made every step of that journey visible without a single wasted moment.
Director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra gave Kulkarni biographies of Ram Prasad Bismil as preparation, including Bismil's own autobiography. The dual role — Laxman Pandey in the present, Ram Prasad Bismil in the documentary-within-the-film — required him to inhabit two people who are essentially the same soul separated by seventy years of history.
Why Rang De Basanti still hits
Rang De Basanti released in January 2006. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the BAFTAs and chosen as India's official entry for the Golden Globe Awards and the Academy Awards. It won the National Film Award for Best Popular Film that year. AR Rahman's soundtrack remains one of the defining musical works of that decade.
But the film's real legacy isn't the awards. It's the fact that nearly twenty years later, people are still making edits, still writing about it, still sending it to each other when the world feels like it's moving in the wrong direction. In February 2026, the entire cast — Aamir Khan, Siddharth, Sharman Joshi, Kunal Kapoor, Atul Kulkarni, Soha Ali Khan — came together for a 20-year reunion screening in Mumbai. The film still demands that kind of gathering.
The video has over 103,000 views. One of those views came from the man who lived the role. That means something.