Insignificant and Lost in those corners you never look.

During those three or four months that I worked as an assistant casting director in a mainstream Hindi film I observed some relationships very closely. The people I got to meet, the people around me, i just kept shut and watched on. Those that came everyday to the audition, most of whom never made it, those hopeful eyes, those failed attempts, those first days, every tiny little thing. So much was happening at that time that I felt like a kid who needed four pairs of eyes, four pairs or of ears to take in everything. Most of those moments I let pass, yet it was only much later that I realized what really happened. Life changed a lot post that film. Those unnamed faces whom we recognized as junior artistes, whom we will remember only because of the agents they came from and for the scenes they were repeated in, will get lost into the oblivion. Those names i will never know and those faces will fade out through time.

Those nameless people had stories to tell. I remember this particular incident quite well, where there was this middle aged lady who had been used in two or three sequences in the film. On the day we had an outdoor shooting schedule at Ballygunge which was to last through the night. The junior artiste requirement for the day was around 15o, and this lady was one of them. The shot was one of a "sindur khela" that is a celebration by the married women in Bengal who play around with vermilion on the fourth day of the auspicious Durga Puja. I being an assistant casting director had to be part of the 100+ crowd and i had to play my part of being one of the many happy young brides who were taking part in this celebration. During the shots there were times it got tough to figure out who was acting and who was not. The space where the virtual met the real. The thin line that differentiated between the pressures of being part of the virtual world with being an insignificant real person. Most of those that they call junior artistes had this very sad reality to live with, not only were they screen extras, reality never treated them any better. Many might think that this blog is an emotional outburst, still others will pass it off as "facts-of-life-you-got-to-live-with" but this is not either one of them. This is my tryst with observations. That lady I told you about, her face is somehow stuck in my mind. She was just one of them, no one special, but in quite a few instances she inquired into my well being like a kindly mother and never forgot to smile at me. The smiles and those few words seemed enough to forge a strange unexplainable connection between two people of two different age groups, two different worlds, who wouldn't ever know each other.

Many people came and went. Many came, saw and conquered. Many like me came, observed and moved away. Many come with ambitions to make it big, some to get away from the woes of the real, yet some others to make money. Everyone of them come with a dream, small or big, i was no different, i came with a dream to find out and learn. Learn, I did, I learnt to create a virtual with extracts from reality. I learnt to put together a lie from pieces of truth, I learnt to make my way out of a maze by simply following the untruths. You follow the lies to get to the truths because all of the virtual has a root in reality. I took back a lot of ill-repute from that experience but I took back some very good lessons in life.