An Interview with Naseeruddin Shah The sad this about this response by Naseeruddin Shah is his daft notion of the `contemporary`. He really does imagine that there is a taken-for-granted present that film makers from this part of the world can live in. And the reason he thinks this is the example of Hollywood where everybody knows what Dustin Hoffman is up to in Kramer vs Kramer. That`s the `present` for him, a bunch of contemporary mannerisms from the metropolis that his Hollywood betters can enact and be famous for playing well. A world where being accurately mainstream is well paid. Envying Hoffman`s payday is forgivable; what is pathetic is his desi worship of Hoffman, this truly second-rate actor who believed that mimesis was the end of actorly art, who disappeared up his narcissistic arsehole in the Rain Man. If he needs a mainstream hero, why not Brando or even Harrison Ford. Naseeruddin Shah isn`t Brando or Kinski, but he`s twice the actor Hoffman ever was; the horror is that he doesn`t know it.