Coming Home

I used to be terrified of the idea of working in the Indian film industry (I mislike the term Bollywood, too pretentious, too desperate, and far too eager to be noticed). Since I was six years old, I’ve been in an International school in Kodaikanal, India, where the language of both everyday life and the classroom was English. And rather than pick up Hindi as my second language, I opted to learn French. I wanted to be a citizen of the world. All my initial contact with cinema and literature were Western. I became a stranger to my own cultural history. A foreigner in local skin.

Then came the American years, the university, the first taste of a theatre as a career, the great loves, the great nights, the city of New York walking beside me, closer than love, closer than my own breath, telling me how long it’s been waiting for me. Those midnight slices of pizza when I was on the way to work, the early morning coffees at Moonshine diner with the remains of the previous night still stinging our happy eyes, sitting in Washington Square Park and watching all the people rush hither thither with their dogs and their children on leashes, shopping for old records in the Village…

They took all that away from me. I felt abandoned, exiled, discarded. That’s what I was when I limped into Bombay. Had nowhere to go where visa hassles for an actor struggling to find work wouldn’t plague me constantly, nowhere except where I’m from.

But going around Bombay, meeting the people I’ve met, restored little by little my confidence that there was work worth doing here, alongside people that love Cinema as much if not more than me. That here were some people I could talk with, share so many coffees with we could be declared toxic hazards. Work that may not be popularly successful, but that we enjoyed doing and believed in. Work that made us proud to be who we were and all the reasons we got to be that way in the first place.

That’s why I’ll forever be grateful to Piyush Jha and “Sikandar”. They brought me home, they told me that it might be a jungle out there, where everyone’s a cannibal and even the rabbits have teeth, but we are not alone. So I go around town and the Internet promoting this film of ours, in an effort to let the others like us know - you are not alone. We are all here, together, and we may stumble, or get it wrong, or fail, but we will never stop trying to be better, trying to become worthy of being called artists.