Part 62:My real struggle began then!

All these verbal demonstrations of your willpower sound so good when you are alone in your room and there’s no one to hear you go off! Reality, especially in a very public forum as cinema, is an altogether different cup of tea.

My real struggle began then.

My biggest struggle was against my worst enemy: time. For it was flying by. And I was sitting at home, day in and day out, simply waiting and watching. Waiting for that elusive phone call and watching those young heroes being launched every single day, many of them becoming big stars. I saw producers who cursed and bitched about superstars giving them the runaround for dates but who wouldn’t risk money on someone like me.

In many ways, my struggle would have been a lot easier had I not had any film to my credit. You can struggle for some ten years without getting a break and then that one brave producer will take chance on you and if you are good, you will make it. For the public, you are still a ‘fresh new face’. My problem, my biggest problem was. That I was no fresh. I was a flop actor. And there is nothing even remotely as hard as it is to make it after being called a flop actor. The freshness is gone you see. So what can any producer market?

In the meantime, heroes who were decades younger than me were being launched every single day and succeeding. Of course I wondered at the injustice of it all but basically I understood. Cinema is all about business. How could I, in all fairness, blame a producer for not putting in his hard earned money on someone who has repeatedly flopped? I may have been appreciated. But my films weren’t.

Some ten/twelve years in the film industry later, people still strained themselves hard enough to try and figure out where they had heard that name ‘Vikram’ before. The more time I spent at home twiddling my thumbs, what little following I had was dwindling.

Vikram?

Wait. Don’t tell us. Oh is it…. Is it…..

They were getting it!

Is it that film……

Yes!

The film that Kamal made? Called Vikram. Is that what you are talking about?

What about Vikram. Ha ha! Some joke. It never failed to induce laughter in the one who cracked it.

I was getting older. I was called a jinxed star. My name spelled disaster.

I was married to Shailaja by now. I was also a father to a beautiful daughter (Akshita) and a son (Dhruv). My kids, especially my daughter, never quite knew why their father spent so much time at home. It was one thing to explain to adults. What do you tell children? Not that she minded or anything but Akshu must have wondered why her daddy stayed at home all the time. And watched films. And watch films I did. I watched everything. Hindi, Tamil, English. From Love Story to Godfather to Murattukalai to Padaiyappa.

If it was a movie, I saw it; after all, what else was there to do?

By now, most of my contemporaries had either graduated to becoming character actors, directors or were acting on TV.

How long can I be idle? After years of staying at home I took to doing bit roles in other languages. Purely to keep the home fires burning. So I again started working for television dramas, telefilms. But nothing worked out.

I acted in whatever movies came my way like whether Telugu or Malayalam. I was the person whom the Malayalam hero would come and rescue. A Malayalam film would have me tied up in some corner on one side. The hero would come and save me. I was asked to perform side roles or appear in a single duet sequence. They would call me for some ‘sidey’ duet in Telugu. I would go do that.

I have lost count of the number of times I have been insulated or yelled at by directors.

When a few of them wanted to try boxing, they found an unwilling partner in me! Dance masters would keep me waiting for hours while they taught dance steps to the third heroine of some Telugu film! There was this one-time acquaintance, an actor who pretended not to even know me when I ran into him at Prasad Studios. Brand new actresses refused films only because I was in them.


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