Failure in Bollywood

Mustafa Quraishi/Associated Press Bollywood actor Salman Khan standing in front of the poster of his film “Ek Tha Tiger” in New Delhi on Aug. 12, 2012.

The tragic suicide of the Bollywood actress Jiah Khan in June got me thinking about my own short-lived foray into Bollywood. I was 22 years old and tired of my first desk job as a research analyst at a small corporate ratings company in New York City. I decided to take some time away from the United States and was traveling through India when I decided I wanted to be a Bollywood star.

I had been acting on stage in New York and seen some success. I had acted in some small but significant plays at La Mama and Second Stage Theatre. I was on a high after The New York Times praised my performance in Manjula Padmanabhan’s play “Harvest,” a science fiction parable about a multinational company and organ trafficking.

In addition, I had met a few Bollywood actresses who didn’t seem particularly talented. I had seen enough Hindi movies that didn’t seem to require much acting talent anyway. Being a movie star in Bombay didn’t feel like an impossible goal. Having grown up in both New Delhi and upstate New York, my accent is vaguely international, my Hindi is far from perfect, and I can wear a chiffon sari quite gracefully.

I’m 29 now and sitting in my apartment in New York City and I am not a Bollywood star. I am among those countless men and women who thought Bollywood was their calling and ended up somewhere else. Fortunately I am part of the smaller subset that ended up finding another career and another passion. I returned to New York City to pursue a masters in creative writing at Columbia University and now my years in Mumbai lend themselves brilliantly to dinner table conversations. Even minor Bollywood stories fascinate people. I can look back at my experiences and laugh and exaggerate them slightly and tell stories until dawn. Few are as fortunate.

The personal stories you hear out of Bollywood - or indeed any competitive industry - include stories of failure only when they are followed by stories of great success. The big stars also had their share of setbacks and their stories are meant to be inspirational. But we don’t hear about the low-level assistant at the small production house who faced only setbacks. The rickshaw driver in Mumbai who was once a backup dancer in a Salman Khan movie will not have his story shared.

What I saw in Bollywood was aspiring actors being unwilling to make the decision to stop trying. In my few years in Mumbai, I auditioned a fair bit. Of all the dozens of movies that I auditioned for and got rejected from, only three got made. One, a small but wonderful independent film, “A Decent Arrangement,” starring Shabana Azmi, I’m actually in. What happened to all the other movies I auditioned for? And if I had had a higher acceptance rate, would I have been tricked into still trying?

I auditioned liberally. The auditions varied. Some of them involved a long sweaty rickshaw ride to a dilapidated building in Oshiwara in northern Mumbai that buzzes with aspirants of all sorts. I would follow scribbled signs to a windowless room and be put in front of a camera for a front shot, right side, left side and then given a few lines of dialogue. The comparison to a mugshot is difficult to ignore but, at the time, I didn’t find this depressing. Every time I turned to my left and had my picture taken, I was filled with excitement and hope. Every time I thought, “Maybe this will be the role. Maybe this click of the camera will change my life forever.” Each room in this Oshiwara building was filled with dozens of young and not-so-young men and women thinking the same thought each time they turned for the cameras.

Diksha Basu Diksha Basu on the sets of the film “A Decent Arrangement” in Chandigarh, Punjab.

As depressing as it sounds in retrospect, the moments when you’re auditioning are moments filled with hope, with potential, with excitement. The rejections come later; sometimes they don’t come at all. What often protects you from the sadness of failure in Bollywood is that, unlike a college application, you don’t find out you were rejected until the movie gets made. More often than not, the movie never gets made. If it does get made and you hear the lines you said at an audition over a year or two ago, it makes little impact. By then your mind is focused on last week’s audition and you’re still filled with hope, potential, and excitement. You never really know that you’re simply not making it.

Early in my audition process, I was cast in a Bengali film. I was thrilled. I feel strongly connected to my Bengali roots and other than a small bit of sleaziness from one of the producers, the rest of it felt legitimate. The film was about a young servant girl who develops a friendship with the old, wealthy matriarch of the house. Despite my Bengali diction not being perfect, I know why I was cast. I am what the film world calls “dusky” â€" I have big eyes and my nose has been pierced since I was 15 and, in designer “servant wear” I do justice to the part of pretty, palatable servant girl who somehow has clear skin, sparkling teeth, and not a single callus on either hand. (In “A Decent Arrangement,” I play the average Punjabi girl next door. I didn’t know I had quite such a versatile look.)

After I had been offered the role, in a rundown office in Juhu, the aging producer, with bloodshot eyes, bulbous dry lips, and a suspiciously thick black head of hair, leaned over, reached for my arm, stroked it, locked eyes with me and whispered, “I can see something special in you. Something really special. Do you know what I mean?” His attempted seduction was a disaster. For starters, I had already signed the contract. And his breath smelled of fried fish and stale cigarette smoke. And I could see that even his heart wasn’t really in it. He didn’t seem confident enough to take advantage of the casting couch properly. He seemed to just be trying it on for size.

Yet there was a complete script, a costume fitting, and talk of a dialect coach for me. It was finally happening! My tickets to Kolkata were booked. I freed my schedule for two months, told everyone I was off to act in a feature film, and got on a plane to live my dream.

Upon arriving in Kolkata I thought I’d sprinkle my behavior with some starlet affectations.  I told my cook that I’d be requiring a hard-boiled egg every morning. I’m not a huge fan of hard-boiled eggs but I needed to make some demands and I couldn’t think of any others. “I’ll probably be shooting long hours so just boil a few eggs and leave them in the fridge for me.” I set off that evening to meet the rest of the team and see the set.

There was no set. I was taken to a shabby, cigarette-smoke filled office where a group of men, including the producer, were sitting around looking dejected.

“The film has been canceled,” one of them said to me, “The funding fell through.” They booked me a flight back to Mumbai.

At least I had a few hard-boiled eggs waiting for me in the fridge. The next evening I was back in Mumbai in my little shared apartment. I was embarrassed. Two very flexible months stared at me, but I was convinced that I had come close. I had already been flown to Kolkata, which meant that next time, surely, there’d be an actual movie. I was determined to keep trying.

I didn’t think about all my friends who were facing exactly the same situation as me. I vividly remember standing at Crossword Bookstore on Turner Road in the Mumbai suburb of Bandra , flipping through Filmfare Magazine, marveling at Deepika Padukone’s bone structure, when I saw a back-page profile of one of the women in my bharatanatyam class. With professional, heavily applied makeup she was barely recognizable, but as I read the interview of her as a new up and comer, I’m embarrassed to admit that my heart sank.

At the time, I was jealous. I didn’t see that these trivial accomplishments didn’t guarantee any professional success. But another aspiring actress I know has managed to spend several years in Mumbai without paying rent - she’s worked out a perfect combination of house-sitting, flirting, and couch-surfing to live completely free in an expensive city. And I suppose that’s a certain kind of success.

For me, it took the small success of “A Decent Arrangement” to make me aware of the fact that I was failing. It isn’t every day that a young actress gets the opportunity to share screen space with Shabana Azmi. I traveled to Chandigarh for my shooting schedule. I didn’t demand boiled eggs. The film was shot, turned out quite beautifully, and went to festivals. It got a positive review in Variety, the American entertainment trade magazine.

John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images A music cassette vendor showing a photograph of Bollywood actor Salman Khan in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Dec. 18, 2001.

During the shoot, I had my own trailer, but in the trailer, the hairstylist and makeup artist mocked me in Marathi. I’m half-Maharastrian and speak the language. They did not know this. I spent endless hours in that trailer trying to act like a movie star in the making while also trying to ignore the catty comments. I didn’t feel like a star and my screen time was nowhere near proportionate to the endless hours spent in that trailer. That’s when I started writing. I would put on my headphones and block out the gossipy chatter and write and get control of my life. While I was writing, I didn’t have to wait for audition calls. I didn’t have to take hot, sweaty rickshaw rides to Oshiwara. I didn’t have to allow old men to stroke my arm. And I didn’t have to listen to my hairstylist complaining about my hair not being thick enough for him to style properly.

“A Decent Arrangement” premiered at the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival in New York City in the spring of 2011. At the premiere, I sat next to my brother and nearly clawed the skin off his arm when I saw my name in the front credits. It was exhilarating. The movie was beautiful and I was proud and as I stood in line for the bathroom after the screening, my smile had overtaken my entire face. An elderly Indian man standing next to me said, “Good job. Good movie. What do you do?” I was stumped. What did I do? Hadn’t he just seen what I did? I was an actress.

A little later, I discovered that the woman whose profile in Filmfare Magazine had made me jealous in Mumbai was modeling for a small jewelry designer. I felt a little sad for her. I had seen too many men and women imagining that their movie break was around the corner.  I had seen them lose touch with reality in their own little Bollywood bubble. One of my friends went back to Princeton to get a masters degree to keep her family pleased but then skipped all the job interviews and rushed back to Mumbai to keep trying. The last time I saw her, she was in the background of an advertisement for cooking oil. But every time I speak to her, she’s smiling and happy and saying things like, “I met Anupam Kher at a party last week. He thinks he might have a lead for me. I’m so glad I came back!” Every time I meet her, she’s certain she’s on the brink of making it.

I didn’t make it. I don’t get recognized on the street. The few times I signed autographs, I became so nervous, I asked the “fans” about their lives and shattered their illusions of having met someone special and inaccessible. But I got to act in a film I’m proud of, do a lot of theater, and, most importantly, I got to leave the industry on my own terms. The stories of the thousands who don’t manage to rise from the ashes never even get heard.

Diksha Basu is working on a novel-in-stories.