Weekend Chronicles - 3 (from reel to real life)

 Another crazy weekend (more like a nonexistent one) leads to another post on the weekend. I have a strange feeling very soon the blog is going to be called the weekend chronicles! Tuesday thoughts now happen on Monday mornings!

I also feel the post format is changing. I have started writing more about myself (in person) which feels good (till now at least) that’s why the poems and articles are now interwoven with what is happening around me.
I don’t know what the people who follow and read the blog like – so let me know : )

Back to the crazy weekend...

I got my room clean and freshly painted with two RED walls on Friday evening!!! I was skeptical about the red but it looks super cool. I spent all of Saturday picking up, moving and arranging furniture. I have a new cupboard (but honestly still no space) believe me, am not hoarding, still there are just so many clothes!!

All of Sunday and till Monday morning we were shooting for a new TVC in Bombay. I came back in the morning and have slept all day. This explains the reason for a late night post.
Shoots are always fun and they give you a lot of time to think. I always wonder about the life of a junior artist in the film industry when I look at one at a shoot.
For one shot there were some 14 ‘extras’ ironically without whom the shot is incomplete so I wonder why they are called ‘extras’ in the first place. The sincerity in them is commendable. For a second of fame they give their 100%.

Fame is so important. Success is relative.

I am looking at a very gujju looking man in a very shiny bright suit being instructed by one of the assistant directors to stand/ then sit/ stand again. Obediently the ‘extra’ does as he is told. He is so scared that when he sits, he doesn’t remove the bag that’s lying on the chair. He adjusts. His eyes show such fear of losing the quarter second of screen presence (which might lead to his big break later) that he won’t take any chances.

Bombay – my city of dreams. There is not one person who comes to this city without a dream. A million ‘extras’ roam around this city each day trying to find their own route to fame.
Finally the model arrives (she is not very pretty in reality) but make-up transforms her. The lights make her beautiful and I can’t help but wonder and notice my own physical flaws. When I look at the model in the monitor all I can think of is my very fat nose. Because I know its make-up I can shun the thought of my fat nose after a second of self pity and laugh but the 14 ‘extras’ don’t. Each one has that hope and that dream in their eyes to someday be that ONE person in front of the camera.

Fame. Who doesn’t want it? Yet how many of us struggle day and night for that quarter second of screen presence?

Most of us just give up without a fight. Or we fight and then in time give up. Paulo Coehlo can keep writing about fighting for your dream and turning lead into gold but how many of us are real warriors and for how long can we be warriors?

We all have a tipping point, what do you do when you tip?

Sometimes we become ‘extras’ in our own personal lives. We are thrown out of the frame and all we can do is ‘adjust’.
The director is calling the shots and we don’t even know if in the final film we will ever show or were we there just to be a part of the crowd?

I am not being a pessimist here but I will agree that I am falling prey to the pitfalls of a thing called destiny.

I have come to realise that sometimes ‘your all’ is just not enough. Sometimes the ‘time’ is just not right. That you can keep trying again and again to make things right yet they will be stuck in an irksome limbo.

Every day is a struggle to move up from being the extra to the lead actor to finally someday the director.

Every day is a new role, a new act where someone else calls the shot.

Every day the lights change and with each layer of pancake a new mask appears.

Every day is a hope that it would be the day when fame would be right there for grabs.

Every day is a fight for maximum screen presence in a sepia toned frame.

Someday, maybe, somehow. 
Soon......