Satish Kaushik shares his Kahani and the fond memories of Rangmanch

When you don’t let culture define your heart, and you dare to walk against the grain chasing what gives you purpose and meaning, you end up right where you best befit. And so did Satish Kaushik.

Headed to Delhi, convinced that he could do what he saw actors doing on the silver screen, he admitted himself to Kirori Mal College, to which he owes the kindling of an everlasting fire that marshaled his life, bringing to him for the first time the craft of theater and acting.
Unaware of the hidden knack he bore of performing, comic timing, and characterizing, Satish took to stage like a duck to water.
The college’s theater group ‘The Players’ produced a play a year; Satish won the best actor for his very first performance.

He recounts all those who molded and brought to finesse his talent and the numerous places where he took his plays and won accolades and recognition. More than his development as an actor, Satish markedly notices how he was more intricately informed about life and relationships through theater.

A “great artform”, he calls it, that brings people together in lifelong connections.

He along the course of his basal journey befriended other contemporary greats like Neena Gupta and Kavita Chaudhary and Nadira Babbar.

Unaware of there being anything like a school for theater, it was one of Satish’s professors who informed and pushed Satish to pursue professional acting and theater at the National School of Drama. Worried about not having the ‘looks’ of an actor, his professor assured him that he looked beautiful enough while acting and that his good work was enough. Deftly dodging his family’s insistence on getting a job at a ballbearing company by dressing shabbily for the interview and throwing away the acceptance letter, Satish got into our country’s cardinal institute for theater, beginning a yet another testing journey that gave shape to his panache. A batchmate of Anupam Kher, Satish made his presence felt in the very first play. He very wisely suggested that a learner needs to be willing to learn more than he is taught at any institute to learn anything substantial at all. Satish dived feet first into literature, philosophy, language, and speech, and improved upon whatever he thought he lacked, better arming and refurbishing himself to give more than he already could.

Moving to Bombay after three years at NSD, Satish found work in a play before he could find a place to stay. Only if it was as easy as it sounds.

The play had an actor backing out at the eleventh hour, giving Satish a role for which he prepared in all but four days, garnering, as you’d think, sweeping appraisals, which Satish never let get to his head. The Rangmanch interview with Bhavna Somaya brimmed with him crediting all those that helped him in his professional life as an actor. Such has been his ingenuity that once when a producer asked him to submit his headshots, having none, he asked the producer if he’d accept his X-ray reports instead, claiming that ‘he is just as beautiful from the inside as he is from outside.

His humility stands testimony to why people would continue loving going to watch and do theater: it is an uncrumpling place that asks to shed the many garbs we resolutely don and identify with when we know that when tried hard enough, we can be, and are, any character we want.