Divyang Thakkar

Kevi Rite Jaish opened on 15 June 2012, directed by Abhishek Jain and produced by Nayan Jain, and it did the one thing Gujarati cinema had stopped doing, which was to look directly at the audience it wanted. The subject was the Patel obsession with getting to America, and the motel empire that half a century of that migration had built there. Thakkar played Harish Bachubhai Patel, the younger son who inherits his father's ambition and fails the visa interview, with Tom Alter as the officer who turns him down.

It was a critical and commercial success, and the Gujarat State committee gave Thakkar Best Actor for it. That prize matters out of proportion to its size. It is the state's own institutions acknowledging the revival at the exact moment it began, and the name attached to it is his.

Two years later he and Jain reunited on Bey Yaar, released 29 August 2014, a story about two childhood friends, a forged painting and the ruin of a friendship. Thakkar played Chintan, called Chako, opposite Pratik Gandhi's Tapan, with Manoj Joshi, Darshan Jariwala and Amit Mistry around them. It ran fifty weeks and became the first Gujarati film hosted by the New York Indian Film Festival.

Look at that cast list again from 2026. Pratik Gandhi was six years away from Scam 1992. Niren Bhatt, one of the two writers, was several years away from Bala, Munjya and Stree 2. Bey Yaar is where the Gujarati talent pipeline visibly starts, and Thakkar is the co lead of it. His Wikipedia biography dates this film to 2015 in one paragraph and 2014 in the filmography table, and the film's own article confirms 29 August 2014, which is the date used here.

After Bey Yaar the acting record thins out and never recovers. Khaatti Meethi Setting in 2016. Boygiri in 2017, an ALT Balaji web series in which he was one of six leads, playing Pragnesh Wakharia. Chasani in 2019 as Rahul. Tu Rajee Re in 2022. Six film credits in total across his whole page, counting a 2011 Hindi short called Kalapaani and an English film called Chanakya Speaks.

The obvious reading is that the career stalled. The record says something else. He had a filmmaking degree from Whistling Woods before the acting began, and on 27 May 2019 Yash Raj Films announced its next Ranveer Singh film with him attached as director. Nobody gets handed a star vehicle at India's most established studio while a stalled acting career is quietly happening. He was writing the whole time.

The film he wrote and directed is about an educated man in a fictional Gujarati village who discovers his second child is another girl, and, knowing what his family did about the six pregnancies before this one, runs. Ranveer Singh played Jayesh, with Shalini Pandey as Mudra, Boman Irani as the sarpanch father and Ratna Pathak Shah as the mother. Maneesh Sharma produced for Yash Raj Films.

Principal photography started in Mumbai on 4 December 2019 and finished on 7 February 2020, five weeks before the country closed. The film then sat for twenty seven months through the pandemic and released on 13 May 2022 to mixed reviews and a box office failure. A first time director putting female foeticide inside a Ranveer Singh comedy was always going to be a hard sell, and it did not sell.

Here is the honest accounting. Jayeshbhai Jordaar lost money and the reviews were mixed. That is what the box office record says and there is no point dressing it up. It also does not touch the structural fact underneath, which is that a man who came out of a Gujarati satire in 2012 wrote and directed a Yash Raj Films release starring one of the four biggest names in Hindi cinema.

Every other route out of a regional industry runs through acting: get noticed in the language, get a supporting part in Hindi, wait. He skipped the entire queue by writing. His Instagram bio reads Screenwriter, Director, Actor, in that order, with 13,429 followers behind it. Almost everyone he has directed or acted opposite has more. The order of those three words is the whole story.