It’s amazing how certain words acquire such specific meanings in specific contexts. The words ‘struggle’ and ‘chance’ for example, can never mean the same thing to a non film walla as they would to someone who has spent years in Bombay trying to get one opportunity to do what s/he wants in films. These two words sum up a range of experiences and emotions so specific to any dreamer in the city. Struggle becomes a shared experience, a phase, an obstacle, and also something that defines and makes valuable the possibility of a ‘chance’.
So many must have gone through this ordeal for these words to have acquired such fixed alternative meanings, you begin to wonder. And surely, many have. You talk to any established actor or director or artist in the industry and they will invariably end up regaling you with stories of their “struggle days” when they had to share a tiny one room apartment with six people or how they had no money to buy food or how, like one assistant director told me, he had worked on a very big budget film right out of college as an AD- but his job on the ground was to take care of all the elephants that were to be a part of a thrilling sequence!
Getting cast in a film in particular is an ordeal, especially in an industry as unorganized as ours. Only now have we begun to see “casting directors” and not “agents”, who take their job super seriously and are interested in looking for new and talented faces. The insider-outsider gap has only just begun to be reduced. What this basically means is that even if you have a “character-actor” type face, there are chances, however minimal, that someone might see a “star” in you. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Richa Chaddha, Irfaan, and Kalki Koechlin stand tall as any outsider’s inspiration for having “made it” on their own terms in an industry that is quite resistant to change and highly susceptible to nepotism and dynastic rule.
So the struggle continues, relentless and ambitious, to finally leave the casting director’s office with a “Good Take!” and wake up the next day to hear the elusive words, “You’ve been selected!”
And after that? Chance pe dance baby!
(featured image courtesy photomaniacs)
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Originally published at castiko.com on August 11, 2016.
