When You Can’t Do Something, It's Your Chance to Learn Again

Learn to gather information. Practice to gain experience. Perform to turn information into knowledge. Feel to be honest.

1. Tell us about your background and journey.

I am a child of doctors who was on the path to joining that illustrious profession, but I ran into the magic that is theatre and was bitten by the acting bug. Started working with theatre companies from a young age, 17 to be precise.

I did everything one does from cleaning floors to making chai to getting a small walk on part to finally being worthy enough to do a lead role. Made my way to mumbai in 2009 and have been here ever since.

2. Did you ever think or dream of being an actor?

It wasn’t the first career option that I had as it wasn’t cherished, encouraged or coveted in my youth like it is today.

3. How can one approach their career and have the confidence and belief to become an actor?

Learn to gather information. Practice to gain experience. Perform to turn information into knowledge. Feel to be honest.

4. If not this, what would you be doing?

My parents gave me the gift of education and I could have been anything I wished. Not much that I couldn’t have done. An uneducated actor is a worthless actor. My other choice of profession would have been traveler.

5. For a complete outsider with inroads, what advice would you like to give?

Be kind to everyone you meet. Know that you will make mistakes but learn from your mistakes. Have the courage to make mistakes. Make your content while you wait for others to ask you to make theirs.

Keep your skills or abilities sharp by engaging in your art-form in some way. Even outside the realm of cinema and television.

6. What is your mantra of success?

When you can’t do something, it's your chance to learn again.

7. Which is your favorite book and why?

"Museum of Innocence" by Orhan Pamuk. No author captured melancholy as well as him and really pushed the reader to examine the unsaid or undone in their life.