By Subhash K Jha

Whether it's Karan Johar, Farah Khan or Viveik Vaswani,Shah Rukh Kkhan is known to go out of his way for his close and long-lasting friends.

It therefore comes as no surprise to know that SRK has done one more straight-from-the-heart deed for old friend Samar Khan.

Samar who made his directorial debut with the candfloss episodic love story Kuch Meetha Ho Jaye three years ago, was at the receiving-end of Shah Rukh's largesse in that film too.

"I consider Shah Rukh my good-luck charm. He had made an appearance as himself at the end of Kuch Meetha Ho Jaye," recalls Samar emotionally."Now for my new film Shaurya, Shah Rukh will be doing something he has never done. He'll be reciting poetry."

Why poetry when other friends want him as item boy (Soham Shah's Kaal) and narrator (Khalid Mohamed's Silsilay)?

Reveals Samar, "I wanted my writer Jaideep Sarkar to write a theme poem that describes my film's mood. He came up with Shaurya kya hai. The poem captures the essence of my film.

Namely, the biases and prejudices prevalent in our society which tend to isolate and persecute communities and individuals. Jaideep's lines were extraordinarily lucid.

I needed a voice and a presence that could make those lines weighty and still accessible to the man in the remotest corner of the audience."

Samar flew down to Goa to speak to SRK about the poem. "Shah Rukh of course being Shah Rukh agreed immediately. He wanted to record the poem on his laptop then and there. But I wanted him to do it properly in a studio."

The poem by Shah Rukh will be part of the Shaurya soundtrack. "Adnan Sami has done the music.And we'll be giving Shah Rukh's poem a musical interpretation for the album," informs Samar, as he readies his film for an April release.

"The theme of the poem is, we need to find the courage within us to fight injustice and prejudice. Shaurya is the film I wanted to make first. But didn't have the courage and the vision to handle as my first film."

The whole team has made the endeavour easier for Samar by backing him to the hilt. "When you've creative people like script writer Jaideep Sarkar, dialogue writer Aparna Malhotra (actor Pavan Malhotra's wife) and a dream-cast like Rahul Bose, Deepak Dobriyal and Seema Biswas, you've nothing to worry about."

Shaurya goes into an army backdrop. "We've seen many films of Chetan Anand Saab and J.P Dutta Saab with an army backdrop.

But they went straight into the war zone. Since I had spent three years of my life in the National Defence Academy I wanted to make a film about life in the army without going into war."

The buzz is that Shaurya is inspired by Rob Reiner's 1992 court-martial drama A Few Good Men.

Samar shrugs off the charge. "Shaurya is about a court martial of a man accused of a terrible war crime. But it's not A Few Good Men. We tend to bring that up in my movie's context because it's the only film in living memory about a court martial."