While “How’s the josh?” from the film Uri: The Surgical Strike remains etched in the minds of Hindi movie lovers, the film’s director Aditya Dhar says that at one point during the shoot, he was about to change the line following a suggestion from actor Vicky Kaushal.
Recalling the incident, Dhar said: “We first shot the line ‘How’s the josh?’ during the Myanmar sequence. Two minutes before the camera rolled, Vicky came to me and asked me to change the line because he thought somewhere the ‘feel’ was not coming. I tried to explain that to motivate their team, army commanders talk like that, so let’s give it a try.”
“I still remember when Vicky said that line for the first time, 30 members of our team had goosebumps on hearing it,” he added during a conversation with veteran screenplay writer Robin Bhatt as part of a programme by the Screenwriters Association (SWA).
What was the story behind the line? “I used to visit the Army club in Delhi along with my friends when I was a little boy. There used to be a former Army officer, who would ask all of us children to stand in a queue and ask us ‘How’s the josh?’. The game was, one by one, all children have to reply, ‘High, Sir’. Whoever would say it the loudest and the best, would get a chocolate. Most of the time I used to win the chocolate,” Dhar recounted.
