Life can be really tough when expelled out of high school. One is really a teenager at that time, and also that one thinks that one is old enough to understand things.
‘Why did they expel me?’
Perhaps a better question would have been- ‘Why did they not expel me earlier?’
I had vague answers to both of these questions, but at this point of time after so many years have passed, these questions seem trivial. School never interested me. I could never make many friends. I did not have friends, what I had were some ‘die hard’ fans. I loved stage. Rather I loved anything remotely related to stage. My father initially hated stage and then all things remotely associated with it, which included his only son too.
He was dead against me having to do anything with theatre. And I wanted to act, whatever it took, at whatever cost. Actors usually do not think with their brains. Insiders would tell you, many of them do not even have it or with time they just unlearn how to use it. What they are left with is a large, spacious and a mighty heart. It takes a lot to be an actor -loads of patience, ability to sustain trough the thick and thin and the innate desire to bounce back.
I was walking with unsteady steps towards my home- kicking dust, pebbles and whatever else I could find. I was not worried about what my old man would say. It hardly mattered anymore. For me with school had ended any further hopes of making it big and somehow finding my way to ‘Bombay’.
I did find my way to Bombay though.
My father owned a significant restaurant in the insignificant town of ‘Panchkula’, adjacent to the ‘city beautiful’- Chandigarh. The town was fast graduating in to being a city itself. My father wanted his restaurant which was getting even more significant by the day. Chandigarh had been meticulously and imaginatively planned by the French architect – ‘Le Corbusier’. But recently due to hyperactivity and immigration, as the city pined to contribute its share to the national growth rates, which had certainly zoomed to skyscraper standards in the past few years, Chandigarh couldn’t accommodate all.
Everything had to change with ‘liberalization’- the new economic policy that the Government had introduced. So the excess load on Chandigarh was dutifully absorbed by the two adjacent cities- Mohali and Panchkula. Together they are called ‘the tricity’. It was this wave of liberalization that had added to the significance of the restaurant. Earlier what had been a suburb was now to become the proud owner of the first ‘mall cum multiplex’ in the town. And so the prospects of business increased manifold. My father who till now had considerable savings and was sitting on a pile of cash suddenly sought to invest it. The restaurant was to become a hotel, and later it would gradually move up the ladder to become a ‘starred’ one and the love of my father’s life. Though he never admitted it but my mother knew that she came a distant second.
In a liberalized economy, to manage a significant new hotel some significantly new ideas were required. My father realized this and suddenly could see value in me. As the successor to the ownership of this venture I was to be trained in the tricks of the trade. I was off to Bombay to join a school that offered a diploma in hotel management. It was not what I wanted to do but still I had to be thankful to my father. In spite of being expelled from school, he was somehow able to ‘manage’ a class X pass status for me. Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur- this man could create things out of nowhere.
A corner of my heart saw an opportunity. The majority of it prepared for an impending disaster. What followed in the following months proved every cubic centimeter of my heart to be worth its weight in platinum.
To begin with hotel management wasn’t fun at all. It was hectic. I had to do everything that a waiter does, so what if I were to become a manager. There were classes which were no fun and there was rest. The ‘rest’ beat classes fair and square when it came to the fun part. The rest included my own fair share of adventure, fun, frolic and friends that I generated and cultivated over the next few months. Fun meant booze, fag and parties all coming from the ‘decent’ pocket money that my father used to send to me. I had new fans who would applaud my performances after we were drunk. The stage would be the parking lot, ‘Juhu’ beach, the terrace of my building or just the footpath. Every night after being on a high, my friends would demand a performance and depending on my mood or the latest movie that I had seen, I would be very soon be imitating some Bollywood biggie.
It was solely my show. I would be the hero, the villain, the maiden, the thief, the heartbroken, the lively and the rest. With the alcohol levels that all of us sustained during these performances, no one remembered anything much of what happened the next morning; never the less it were these performances that kept the spark glowing somewhere.
May be I was dressing salads and learning to maintain the operations of a hotel smooth, but a part of me was beginning to rebel. The fetus of an actor was demanding to be born. But in India where infanticide is still not under control, who cares for an ‘insignificant’ fetus.
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