Being An Actor

Ever wondered about this? Your grandmother cooks so bloody well. Bloody hell, she can give any celebrity chef a run for his money. But how come she is far from being a celebrity even in the home? That's because she is the granny -- a silver-haired women who is expected to cook well. When granny was young, she might have had a million dreams and cooking must have been the last thing on her mind. But then, granny was forced to get married while she was 16, and back then it was important for her to acquire culinary skills in order to make a good daughter-in-law. So she learned whatever she could and, over the years, by the method of trial and error, became an accomplished cook.

In other words, she is an actor who honed her acting skills over the decades. Deep inside her heart, she might have hated the idea of cooking, and yet she blossomed into a brilliant cook. That's because she was a great actor.

That way, we are all great actors, truly great actors -- unworthy of the millions of dollars or awards like the Oscar only because our canvas is very small, often not beyond 1,000 sq ft of space. In every small, little Indian home -- or even a big home for that matter -- there exist actors who play their roles so well that no one has a clue that these actors are actually capable of thinking beyond the written script. The husband is a man who comes home at six every evening, after a hard day's work. The wife is a woman who keeps the food ready. The granny is the woman who parts with secret recipes. The aunt is a woman whose job is to... well, how well they play their roles.

We are always sons, daughters, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers and so on. We are never ourselves. Our only obligation is to play our characters well. Because if we don't, we are called 'loose' characters. So a man doesn't look at women other than his wife. A woman doesn't entertain the thought of a man who is not her husband. Such good actors we are.