Actor Abhay Deol, who plays a Tamil IAS officer in Dibakar Banerjee`s next `Shanghai`, took language lessons to get into the skin of his character, and the director feels that he has surpassed Shah Rukh Khan`s act in `Ra.One`. SRK played a Tamil game designer, Shekhar Subramaniam in his dream project. Now, in Dibakar`s venture, Abhay plays a 40-year-old Tamil bureaucrat.

"I can say he did better than that (Shahrukh Khan`s Tamil act). Before the shoot began, for three months, he (Abhay) had asked for a Tamil coach who can teach him Tamil alphabets, language and the accent. He had also asked me to rehearse Tamil lines with him before the shoot," Dibakar told reporters here last night, at the first look of `Shanghai`. For Abhay, playing this role was not an easy task.

"This character is alien to me. So I worked more on the language. The character that I play is egoistical, short-tempered, he is very reserved and religious person. The big stumbling block for me was the language. As I am a Tamil guy in this film, so on the accent part, we did not want to make it sound stereotype, as whenever we have had South Indian characters in Hindi films they bring those typical accent," Abhay said.

"We were having someone on the sets who was Tamil, who used to read the dialogues to me, I did study the language. I took accent only in certain words only as we did not want to stereotype it. So how do we not make stereotype and yet make it sound Tamil, was the main thing for me to do," he said.