The mean streets of Mumbai host a new breed of strugglers—second-generation actors from US and Finland, The Netherlands and UAE, who have left their worlds in the hope of storming Bollywood
Growing up in Sacramento, California, Nisha Umesh was surrounded by Bollywood, its nostalgia, excesses and clichés. She never got it out of her system. So here she is in Mumbai, twang and all, at the Actor Prepares school in Juhu, learning how to dance, emote, fight and ride horses—the complete acting ‘package.’ “You know, I was a model in California and acted a bit too. But I missed the extravagance, the song and dance, the masala of the kind of cinema I had grown up watching,” she says. One day, she spotted advertisements of Anupam Kher’s acting school Actor Prepares and sent a DVD application recording two scenes. “One was a monologue in English and the other was one of my favourite Bollywood scenes—the confrontation between Preity Zinta and Shah Rukh Khan in Kabhie Alvida Na Kehna. I enacted Preity’s part. It worked,” she says.
In her batch of 25, there are four NRIs like her. The records of the three-year-old acting institute tell a story. “From just one in the first batch, nearly half the class in our last batch (14 out of 25) comprised NRI students,” says its CEO Sailesh Kottary. “And, not just UK, Canada or USA, students are flocking in from unheard of places like Finland, Norway, New Zealand and Netherlands.” In September, the institute will make its international debut with an acting school in London. Other Mumbai-based acting institutes show the same trend. Kishore Namit Kapoor, whose Acting Lab completes 25 years in 2008 and has alumni like Hrithik Roshan, Kareena Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra and Akshaye Khanna, has been inundated with franchisee offers from USA, Canada and UK. “But my school is not a McDonald that I keep opening franchisees. Ultimately, one has to come to Mumbai for a Bollywood break,” he says. His class of 60 has five NRI students.
The attraction lies in the figures. The Indian film industry produces 1,000 films annually (twice Hollywood’s output) and employs six million people. In 2004, more people watched Bollywood than Hollywood globally (3.8 versus 3.6 billion), according to the Bollywood News Service. Poised to corner 12 per cent of the global entertainment market in 2008, now it also has the money, the projects, the roles and the inclination to fit in different ideas, skin tones and accents. Compare that to the paucity of roles for Indian-origin actors in Hollywood and you see why they are opting for the ill-famed Mumbaiya struggle. Uma DaCunha, casting director for many international Indian projects like Lagaan, Monsoon Wedding and Water, told us that queries for roles in Indian films from actors abroad has definitely more than doubled in the recent past. “Now we are making more global films. Even the context is changing with more films on Indians abroad being made by Indians in India.”
“The idea of Bollywood is slowly expanding,” says Samrat Chakrabarti, one of the leading actors of the NRI film scene in USA, and last seen in India in Loins of Punjab Presents, Bong Connection and Kissing Cousins. “I have noticed in the past couple of years, that a lot of interesting international films are being made and being cast out of India. Being a south Asian actor in the USA, there are mostly stereotypical characters for us to play. I have played everything from a terrorist in films to a doctor in The Sopranos. But I want to play more interesting characters. While Hollywood may be known for its liberal views, it will still take time to change its view on race. Being a brown man in a white industry, I am not involved in politics, but politics is involved in me,” he says. The acting schools, however, do not cater to the ‘arty’ acting sort. Here it is all priming up for the blockbuster factory. Umesh’s classmate Rimel Chahal, who has already done a couple of short-term acting courses in Florida says, “While abroad it was more about reading your lines right and underplaying of emotion, here it’s much louder—its about going the whole gamut.”
