The Outsider

I was waiting in the office of a film production company in Chennai for my interview. A few minutes later, I was called in and asked to take a seat. After looking at my last place of work in my CV, which was one of the biggest film production houses in Mumbai, the interviewer was surprised because he had seen many people in the cinema industry migrating to Mumbai from Chennai but I had done the exact opposite of it and he failed to understand the reason behind it. I smiled and of course gave him the answer that he wanted to hear. However his question took me back in time.

Mumbai…a city where one cannot help but see the sheer scheming and pleading for money, food and shelter in every nook and corner of the area. There are people from all walks of life. Everybody goes there to try and make a purposeful living through various means. The city reeks of the struggles of thousands of people that arrive there each day, their heartbreaks, their crucial failures, their courageous dreams and undying hope.

I had relocated from Chennai to Mumbai for a short while to explore work opportunities in Bollywood. On my first day in the busy streets of Mumbai, I sensed poverty, disability, suffering and filth parading at every possible doorway. All the people were in an imaginary race, struggling to arrive at a destination, only that nobody knew what or where the destination was. There was an overwhelming rush in them which I couldn’t understand. None of the people ever smiled. It felt like I was suddenly in the midst of some complex and extravagant performance and somehow I was the only one who didn’t have the script of it.

Passing by all these sights, I pushed my way through the heavy traffic and reached my workplace in Andheri West (A suburb in Bombay). It was a famous film production house that produced some of the biggest blockbuster films of Bollywood. It was my first day at work and I was geared to prove my talents & capabilities. I was told I will be meeting the Producer for a quick introduction before I could begin my work. A few minutes later I found myself sitting quietly in front of a bald, tall grim looking man while he sized me up . I was in for a big shock when his very first question to me was if I knew how to operate a laptop and type in Microsoft Word. At first I thought he was joking and I just answered a plain convincing yes. He then asked me about my prior work experience to which I answered elaborately about the various Tamil films that I had worked on. Somehow, half way through he cut me off, turned towards the Head of the Department sitting next to him and told him that he should reconsider his decision of hiring me as he doubted whether South Indians like me will be able to work on his “mega blockbuster” project.

A plethora of emotions ran inside me. Even though I was angry at the man’s shamelessness and utter disrespect towards me, a part of me couldn’t stop laughing at his complacency. I interrupted his "brilliant" argument and made him aware of the fact that I was in fact a Gujarati (though I felt an innocent tingle of happiness that I was considered South Indian), and I understand that maybe my accent and work experience would have given a different impression but that was actually not the case. I then paused for a minute before telling him that come to think of it, maybe I didn’t know how to operate a laptop, in the way he didn’t know how to respect people. Little did I know that this was one of the many instances of the sheer identity crisis that I was going to face and of course lots more followed.

Over time, I met a lot of people who always questioned by identity. I failed to understand why did it matter which part of India did I come from. They used to be thoroughly confused with the way I spoke simply because my English had a South Indian accent while my Hindi had a Gujarati accent. Two years passed by and I continued to feel like a stranger in the so called “City of Dreams”. Somehow Mumbai and I just could not get onto speaking terms. It never seemed to work. To me the city was just a haphazard neglected slouch of painful lives. It was a place for people to see, to be seen and to see themselves in the act of being seen.

I finally left Mumbai in 2014 and went back to Chennai only to realize the smiles in the eyes of the people that I had missed, the vibrant colours that I had missed, the delicious fragrance that I had missed. I sensed the welcoming smell of my city and I knew that my turmoil had finally ended.