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Nandini Ramnath
MUMBAI, SEPT 24: Le gayee le gayee from Dil to Pagal Hai streaks through a classroom at the BKM School, Babulnath, the 13-year-old gets into the act. Her eyes unwavering from a camera that's filming her, she's the epitome of adult allure. `Cut', yells Kulin Vora, and the girl snaps out of her reverie. Cut to another 12-year-old, who also proceeds to give her `screen test' with another film dance. By evening, Vora's `Global Talent Bank' has screen-tested some 20-odd hopefuls singing, dancing and lisping poems. After a shortlist, the bank, set up last month, will groom the children for television and advertising.
GTB is banking on the absence of an organised fora for catering to an increasingly children-fixated entertainment industry. Precocious children have arrived big-time with TV serials and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Dil Kya Kare. So GTB hold screen-tests in schools on weekends - like the one held at BKM on September 4 - and by December, train them for three months. At a price of course,for Rs 5,000 per child. Then cassettes will be sent to the potential employers, TV serial and ad-filmmakers.
``Our training will give them an edge to get into TV or advertising,'' says Vora. Adds his son Nimit, ``If you deposit your talent here, we will invest it elsewhere. The increase in the number of TV channels will create more demand. But as yet there's no adequate supply?''
For the hopefuls who flock to be Vora's customers, the lure is not of the money, but the trip of becoming famous. BKM student Dolly Dhaiwala, 12, says she prefers singing to acting, but ``I would want to go on TV. Everybody will recognise me and ask me for my autograph.''
The floodgates are open: Just one show, Colgate Gel Boogie Woogie on Sony, receives around 3,000 entries when it holds auditions every three months. On a rainy September 12, when shoots to can episodes were held, dolled-up made-up kids waited for hours, parents in tow, for their moment of glory. Ravi Behl, the show's producer, says the volume at theauditions is `incredible'. ``Just 50 per cent of the crowd is from Mumbai, the rest are from Delhi, Surat, Ahmedabad, even Dubai.''
More than the slew of prizes - at least 20 - it's the chance of going live that's roping them in. Beamed the mother of 13-year-old Khushboo Shah, who travelled from Surat for the shoot, ``This show will telecast all over India and even abroad the fact that a girl from Surat has made it.'' Contestant Maya Mukundan shyly says, ``We want to be famous and come on TV.'' Adds her mother, ``It's not the prizes we're here for but that fact that the children get a chance to expose their talent.''
Industrywallahs point out that the children are rarely interested in acting and barely know what to do. It's parents, their fellow travellers on shoots after school hours or to studios on the one weekly off holiday on a week, who hold the reins. Parents promote kids `like hell', an ad film producer succinctly says. And it's touch and go in the loosely structured industry, where alldepends on the budget and a child could earn upto 40,000 or even a couple of hundred for an ad.
Comments Vijay Krishna Acharya, writer of Just Mohabbat on Sony, ``I've seen parents pushing kids who are barely six months old. Who knows, may be in some families, that six-month-old could be providing for the household.'' Children may want to be on TV, but their lives are experiential and their attention span short, he adds. ``Kids need a motivating force, which is mostly parents.''
But when the going gets good, the good gets going. Children could earn between Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000 per episode on TV serials. Children spotted on Boogie Woogie have made it big, getting breaks in dance sequences in films like Kuch Kuch... and Dil Se. Not surprisingly, the Global Talent Bank has been approached by at least six schools for screen-tests, and Saturdays may soon become a date that star-struck children and ambitious parents will want to keep.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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