 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you are joining us from, my name is Abhijit Madhuri. I work as a talent advisor to organizations and individuals who are looking to upskill and be part of this vibrant skills economy, which we are all going to be a part of. My guest today has a couple of interesting aspects to him. So he has lost his wallet multiple times, once in the parking lot, twice at the airport, and has managed to find it for some strange reason. He manages to find those every time. He has the distinction of carrying a friend across seven or eight kilometers while they went hiking and this friend broke an ankle over the Sapura mountain range, you know, trying to do that. And of course, you know, the other interesting element is that he got selected to the Delhi School of Economics. Didn't sort of look at the admissions list because he was absolutely sure that he is not going to ever make it. So it was only when his father said that, well, did you go and look it up that he actually managed to do that? This gentleman, let me say that he is not only a well-known actor and director, both on screen as well as in theater. The other hint I've got to give for you is that he is instrumental in reviving the lost art form of storytelling called Dasan Goyi, which he is later expanded and Kisebazi. He runs a theater company called Hoshruba Laboratory in Mumbai. Of course, I'd go to be delighted to introduce my friend, Dhanish Hussain. Gosh, those are very impressive photographs. Thank you. Thank you, Abhijeet. It's such an honor to be here and to reconnect with you. Well, these photographs, I've got to see my photographer friends, very skilled professional people who without any kind of fee or anything, just happily come and shoot me and then pass over these few photographs for me for moments like these that it can be used. Thank you very much. It's just reminding me that when we first met, which is almost like a decade from now, and you were with Vipro India at that time and you had invited me to conduct a workshop in storytelling with the personnel at Vipro, which was in this very fancy studio, Ramaji Studio in Hyderabad. And I had turned up there day one with the black nose because that's right. I was coming to the studio. I had an accident when I hit my head against the headrest in front of me in the car. And I just, I had a black nose, which was very embarrassing, but there wasn't much I could do about it. So the whole storytelling workshop began with a very interesting studio. Why this man has a black nose? It was incredible. It still remains one of the workshops that people still talk about. In fact, I met one of the participants the other day and he mentioned Dhanesh in one of those films. And I said, yes, so he's got a thriving career now in films and all that. And thank you so much for taking time today. This is a workshop which is all about careers and how people sort of have different kinds of careers. So you've had a pretty interesting shift. You did not start off being an actor because I know that you studied to be an economist. At least you went to Delhi School of Economics subsequently to, you know, did a business degree. You know, I had FMS, Faculty of Management Studies. You had a degree in that and MBA. You joined the bank and you left the bank. Talk to me about that. What, what did, when you were growing up, what did you want to be? What was your, if somebody has said what do you want to be when you grow up? What would that be? You know, I was growing up in a traditionally many class house where the aspirations are pretty straight jacketed. Either you be a bureaucrat or you'll be an engineer or you'll be a doctor or you go abroad and get a degree, a PhD and be an academic. So very standard career paths. They were there. Both my parents were academics. My father was a research economist at the agro-economics research center, which was an adjunct, affiliated institute to Delhi School of Economics. And my mother was a professor of personal literature at the University of Delhi at the arts faculty. So you can kind of understand as to what kind of aspirations my parents had. And also we were living in an era which was pretty insurance of information, most of the information about what career should be or what life should be was very much what you were getting from your parents and your uncles and extended network of friends and families around you. The mainstream information was really a newspaper or television and which was really one way. There was no way to interact. We did not know of other career paths or how sustainable those career paths are. So I was also very much like that, either I'd be a bureaucrat or I'd be an engineer or I'd be an academic. Very soon I realized that I could not be bureaucrat, engineer or doctor any such career path which required carrying a competitive exam. I realized I'm not good at that. I can't crack that. So automatically the options of being a civil servant of being an engineer or being a medical doctor dropped out because I was just that, you know, I wasn't good enough to crack on competitive exams. So when I gave the entrance exam for Delhi School of Economics, I was pretty sure I would not make it. And for three days, I just didn't bother to go and check the admission list notice till my dad, who of course was working in same institute came back home and said, why are you not going and depositing your fee for Delhi School of Economics? And I said, what fee? And he said, well, you've made it. Your name is on the admission list. And because we used to live very near to the university, so I immediately took my bike and I went straight to the Delhi School of Economics and saw my name on the list. And next year, of course, I deposited my fee in Delhi School of Economics. Almost everyone, once they are finishing their second year, their masters, most of the people are applying for their PhDs and various Ivy League universities. So I did the same thing. So basically, I didn't really have any vision of what I wanted to be. I was just doing what I was told or I was just doing what I was seeing other people do. And when I finally got the admission in University of West Virginia for Environmental Economics, PhD in Environmental Economics, and all my costs were covered, tuition waiver and all those graduate assistantship, I just developed cool fee. And I said, look, it's barely managed to clear the school. I don't think I can go to a cold country far away and study in other four years and then get a degree. So these pay me, don't push me, I don't want to go to the US. And my dad surprisingly agreed to it. And that took me to the corporate world. And I got into the banking and that's the time when post liberalization economy was opening up. You had all these multinational banks and institutions coming in. So I applied and I got the job and I started working for them. This is Bonomi with the banking culture in the corporate world is very short lived. And very, very quickly, I started realizing that this is not really something that I'm enjoying. I'm not thriving in it. I'm just in the wrong departments where career growth is quite stunted, the departments where the career growth is faster within the banking industry, I'm somehow not making in into those departments and and the culture, the culture of, you know, sycophancy and basically too much networking and glip talking and being in the good books of the higher managerial position bosses, that wasn't really sitting with me. Well, you know, I was, I still kind of believed in the old style of banking where you basically first satisfy the customer and make sure a satisfied customer gives you more business. Whereas culture was becoming more about just turning banks into FMCG and you just, as if you're selling soaps and shampoos and and it doesn't matter whether the customer is satisfied or not, you just expand the customer base and getting whatever business and show numbers on excellent charts at the end of the day. So all this led to a kind of a disappointed, disgruntled existence which was not really good for my own mental health and for my own good being. And meanwhile, I also started exploring activities which will keep my evenings engaged and that led me to theater and over a period of three years of overlapping between theater and banks, I realized theater is something that I'm enjoying most and perhaps maybe this is something that I should pursue and that led me to Resire, which was here 2002, roughly around 31, 32 years of age and since then it's 2023 and we're sitting here and we're talking, so it's like two decades. When you look at the whole preparation for being an actor, you've actually had the opportunity to learn from, you know, the biggest names in theater, whether it was Barry John or M.S. Satyu or Nasseruddin Shah and Habib Tanveer and all the greats of Indian theater. When was this? Was this while you were growing up or was this after Delhi School of Economics when you decided? This was when I switched to theater. I mean, Barry, of course, happened when I was still working in bank and I was looking for options to engage, make my evenings better and I realized I want to do theater but I had no prior experience in theater and I started looking for information and Barry's name had become big at that time, this was 1998 and both Shah Rukh Khan and Manoj Bhashpai had kind of become huge. So everybody was talking about this one theater director in Delhi who was kind of a mentor to these people and I sought him out and he asked me, do you have any experience? And I said no and he said, well, you come over and attend a workshop which led to my first acting workshop, kind of my first grounding in acting and when I joined Barry John's workshop, that's the first time I realized actually that it is a skill. It's not really that if you feel intuitively you can actually connect. It's a serious skill you have to kind of acquire the wherewithal of acting and you need to apply those and over a period of time with rehearsals, with the application, with understanding, with research, you will be getting closer to a more accurate portrayal of the characters that you want to do. So that's the first time I realized that the skill that needs to be acquired and practiced and learned and applied before you could see results. So when you think about acting today versus, let's say, the version of acting that you chose to pursue and build your career in, how has that evolved? You know, how would you have defined it then versus when you're thinking about it as a career if somebody says, this is what I have to do? What's the difference? So, you know, there is a clear division in my career. I mean, I started off as a stage actor and for a good decade, I was just a stage actor. Then I kind of started doing cinema and gave a screen actor. And now I pursue both screen and stage together. So when I became a screen actor, I realized two things. First thing I realized was that we are not the generation that were born with camera and cell phones and social media and gadgets. So we were very self-conscious when the camera would come on us. Because I had some kind of foolhardiness or, you know, some kind of rashness in me. On stage, I didn't have a problem. I never became self-conscious on stage. On stage, I would be very comfortable in my natural self and performing and acting. But the moment I came in front of the camera, I would become very self-conscious. Suddenly, my mannerism would change. My body language would change. I would be very self-aware and that was a problem which I realized the generation after us don't because they've grown up with cell phones and social media. So it took me a while to ignore the camera. It took me a while to train myself to not let camera be on my mind and not hinder my performance. That was there. And that was the first thing which the self-consciousness of the camera, that was the person which I realized. And then I also realized that the process of finding a character whether on stage or on camera is similar. But the implementation of that is different because of the medium change. So on stage, you are physically presenting yourself to the audience. And it's most of the time unidimensional in the sense that the audience is in front of you physically the direction of your performance is straight ahead or some kind of a quadrant where you are no varying between that quadrant. So it requires skills like projection, requires kids like making sure that even when you are loud, you don't make it over the top and you still make it palatable for the audiences to get the nuances of what performances are. And that quickly changes when you come in front of the camera because here the audience is literally reaching up close to you. So suddenly your whole performance changes. You don't need to be projecting. You don't need to be mindful of where the audience is sitting. You just have to be as natural as you could rest the camera would do. And the other thing that I realized was that in order to have the cinema acting effective, you need to understand the edit and you need to understand the shot taking. So you must be able to understand which is the shot that could make it into the edit for the film. How do you know that? What is the process of doing it? Apparently by observing it by watching cinema, by observing filmmaking on the set. And I started realizing that a scene is divided between different shots. There is a wide shot, a master shot, a mid shot over the shoulder, close ups. All these shots are stitched together to make one proper scene that you would see eventually when the film comes on the screen. In terms of the performance, the emotional performance, the close up shots are the more important one because that's where your face is coming full on the screen and all the emotions and everything that you're saying has to come on your face. But then when it's a wide shot or a master shot when the camera is far away, it's more physical acting. So that means your posture, the way you are standing, the way you are gesticulating, all these are important. And you have to make sure that what you did in the wide shot, which was mainly physical acting, where it was the body. So it's like I'm standing by the roadside and I see the two men are fighting. I'm not able to understand the context, but I can see their bodies moving in a particular way, which gives me an impression that there is kind of a scuffle happening there. And when I reach close to them, that's when I see them really lunging at each other with ferocious words and expressions. So my first observation of them standing across the street and my walking up to them and then seeing actually up close, what is it that they're saying is match it. Similarly, so I have to do the same thing in acting as to I have to make sure that when a wide shot comes and the audience members see me standing or doing something and suddenly when the camera cuts and zooms to my face, there is a consistency between what they saw there and what they're seeing on my face up close. These things started making sense and that gave me an idea. Okay, when this shot is happening, this is where my focus should be. I should be more looking at the physical performance. When the shot comes closer, I should be looking more in terms of my emotional performance. When the camera is on my co-actor, I just need to give my lines correctly and not really performing in the sense the camera is not on me. So understanding the edit and the shot taking was very important given effective performance. Then you could calibrate your performance and make sure that you give the right pitch or tone when that particular shot comes and not that if there are 15 takes you are performing with the same energy and all 15 of them is then you're basically wasting your energy. So these things slowly and slowly started dawning on me and I started realizing that as the medium of the performance changes, you have to calibrate your performance and you have to make sure that your performance suits that medium, that particular medium, so as to be more effective with the audiences. You know, when you think about your crafters and actor, you also, you are an avid reader, you've learned various languages. Talk to me about those things, where do they fit in? And the reason why we are sort of really talking about that is, you know, one of the things that I talk about in my book career 3.0 is one of the big skills to build is how do you teach yourself things that you do not know? What is that method of doing that? And you know, you've learned languages, you've picked up the nuances of pronunciation. You sort of really build expertise. It's not just that casual dabbling that we are talking about. You know, how do you do that? Well, I think that, you know, I remember, Abhijit, there was one performance of Dastangui and post-performance, there was a Q&A and it was at some college when that few were performing. We had these young undergraduates sitting there, the whole auditorium bristling with them and post-performance. So they really loved the performance. That was, of course, in Urdu and post-performance. One of the kids stood up and asked this question to me that, you know, your bio says that you went to Delhi School of Economics and FMS and this and that. And now your career is kind of performing stories of Urdu. So don't you think you had wrong education? Shouldn't you been studying this all your life and not going and studying economics and banking? And I laughed at that time and I just said, I just went to wrong schools. But the truth is this, that no education goes waste. What we study, why we what study, maybe because of many circumstantial things happening in our lives and we end up doing whatever we end up doing. But supposedly you have reached a certain stage in your life and now you want that your switch, you want to do something else in your life. It does not mean what you've done before is a waste. Because one of the things about us human beings is that the skill that kind of differentiates us from other species is our ability to read patterns, our ability to draw inferences by studying data and then draw inferences and see patterns. And you might have studied something different. You might have you might have studied medicine, you might have studied somebody has studied engineering, somebody has studied mathematics. But the picture, the blocks of acquiring education are very similar. The way we declassify and deconstruct or classify things and then assimilate knowledge and then process it and then regurgitate it and apply it in our real lives. That process is very similar. That is not changing. Once you kind of understand the template, once you kind of understand how you acquire knowledge. So if you were just looking at one stream of career as a mountain and then the next stream of career as the next mountain, it might just be very Herculean and a very daunting task that oh, I need now need to cross another mountain. But once you kind of deconstruct that and see beyond and look at the template of acquiring knowledge, you realize that it's pretty similar. So if I've done something like this, it would not take me long to kind of understand something else. And once you start getting those hacks, it becomes easier for you to kind of do the next thing. It's just like when you're writing your first book, I'm sure when you wrote your first book, it must have been very daunting. And it was like, oh, I can never finish writing a book. And then you wrote it. And then you realized, oh, this is my learning, which you applied and which kind of became your learning curve. And the second time when you wrote it, it didn't take you that much time. And slowly and slowly, you know, you realize that, okay, there is a method to it. And you apply that methodology, you apply those templates and things start happening. And I think it's the same thing for one book to the other book. Now it might be that the first book you wrote was a fiction, while the second book you wrote was a fiction. So you are in that sense, literally going into something very different. You know, it's all nonfiction. But in the process, you realize that the hacks are kind of similar. It's just the content that is changing. But the process of writing the book is not really different. Similarly, it might seem to you it's a great career change. And I have to literally rebuild myself or start from the scratch. But the thing is this, the process is pretty similar of acquiring knowledge of the processing it or assimilating it and then applying that knowledge in order to get results. That process is very similar. And once we start understanding that, it becomes easier to acquire different skills. So I think people should not see it as that life altering or that daunting that, you know, this requires me getting a rebirth in order to do it. No, you can you can just do it. Just whatever knowledge you've acquired so far, don't think it's a waste. And just look for the methodology, the template, what is behind the curtain, behind the scenes and then apply that understanding. And it would become easier to acquire the new knowledge. Was there anybody in your family who was an actor, who therefore you could rely on and say, if that person can do it, I can do it as well? No, the first one. No, I was the first one. My daughter is the first one who was a singer in our family. So absolutely not. And one great example is my sister. My sister was an English major from Delhi University. She went to Delhi University, did her master's in English literature, and then she got married and she came back here. She came here to the US. I'm in the US right now. And in fact, I'm in her house right now. And as it happens, she, you know, she was newly married. She gave birth to a child. So she became more involved with house help during the child. And then my father suffered from a chronic kidney disease. So he had a chronic renal failure. And my sister, this was year 2000, she was visiting India. And she was completely frustrated by her experience in the hospitals, in terms of getting information on my father, in terms of making sure that he gets the best treatment. So she got so frustrated that she came back to the US. And she went to the university saying that she wants to apply and want to be a doctor. The university told her that because you didn't have a science stream in your high school and in your enter, you cannot study for, or MBBS, but you could stay be a nurse practitioner. And she studied nurse practising. And she studied over eight years, acquired whatever stages and degrees of nurse practising. And today she's a very successful nurse practitioner, has been for the last 15 years working in major hospitals here in the Detroit area, completely well versed with all medical knowledge. It's amazing that she started off when she was 29 and 30 in over the next two decades. She has built a very successful career as a nurse practitioner. So I'm saying that acquiring a new skill is really not as daunting as it may seem. It's really the willingness to go back to school and the willingness to open yourself again and the willingness to be open to any knowledge that is coming your way here. The more we remove the filters that we have, the more we remove the blockages, it will become easier for us to kind of invite the knowledge that's coming our way. And then it's a simple process of application. You learn, you apply, you observe and that's how we move forward. When you let banking, one of the reasons that you talked about was that it was hard to be part of that ecosystem when you had to suck up to various people and people around you saw them doing a lot of this. Now, I'm not from the ecosystem that you are in which is acting and performing arts and all of that. But what I read about in all the gossip magazines and those columns is that it's not different that you still have to suck up to the, you have to be part of the scam when you have to be sucking up to this particular director. Is that true? Is it, you know, you've been an insider in both theater as well as movies. Is that true? See, human beings are human beings and one of our characteristics is tribalism because that's how we actually survived when the hunter-gathering period was in our lives is that your best survival was being part of a collective. So when you be part of a collective, the chances of you thriving, surviving is better and this tribalism is so inherent and so ingrained in us, it's very difficult to break. But that's not really the situation. So it's very much ingrained. So I think irrespective of what field you are in, you will see these social dynamics at work, somebody being alpha, somebody taking the lead, somebody, you know, herdism is happening, few people going there, it all happens. But also, you know, the kind of industry that we have. Eventually, it's your work that could speak for you. No amount of politics, networking, buttressing, people backing you is going to really lead you anywhere. At the end of the day, if you cannot act well on screen, it will be palpable to the audiences. If you're not a good filmmaker, it will be very much showing to the audiences. So, you know, the brass tax is this, that if you do not have the nuts and bolts to show what you want to show, the audiences will very quickly look through you and you will not be able to sustain yourself. So I think eventually in our industry, it doesn't really matter what camp you are or who you are supporting. Yes, you might speed up your career sometimes by joining some bandwagon. You might find it difficult if you choose another path. But I think eventually it is really about your ability to tell stories and how effectively you can use the skills and the tools that are there to tell those stories effectively. And if that you can do, then you will excel eventually, I think. In my book, I talk about storytelling as one of the skills for the future. You've been a professional storyteller starting with all your experiences in career and films and theater and now, of course, as you are writing your own repertoire. What is in your mind a story and what is a storyteller and why does it matter if I'm not part of the performing arts? Why does storytelling even matter? So, you know, one of the things that you mentioned was about being part of multiple ecosystems. One of the reasons why you would see me as a person in multiple ecosystems is because I do not see those systems as different systems. I just see them stories getting implemented in a different way. So, I essentially see myself as a storyteller and sometimes if that story needs to be said as a poem, I say I write it as a poem. Sometimes if that story needs to be said as a direct play for stage, sometimes that story needs to be said in a film medium that it becomes a screenplay. So, essentially, these multiple ecosystems are coming because primarily the storyteller, I am deciding as to what is the medium I want to tell my story better in and thus I end up being in that ecosystem where that story is being told. So, eventually I would say that we all are storytellers actually. Everybody is a storyteller. You are a storyteller, I'm a storyteller because at the end of the day this is we want. We have a story and we want to pitch that story to others so they become stakeholders in the story and more people become stakeholders in a story, the more the resources that story will get which would mean that a larger number of people would be able to sustain themselves better. So, essentially everybody is doing a story. There's a tech story happening. There is a political story happening. There is a cultural story happening. There is a art story happening. There is a fashion story happening. There is a culinary story happening. So, at every level somebody is telling you a story and the whole idea is this. It's not really the food. It's not really the tech of the iPhone. It's not really the tech of the stream yard. It's really the story behind this that should peg itself in the stakeholder's mind and that would attract the stakeholder towards this product or towards this experience or towards this film or towards this restaurant and that once they come in and what their experiences matches the story that you've told their soul and that would eventually result in higher volumes happening for whatever your stake is. So, I think everybody is a storyteller and when you are preparing to pitch your story to a stakeholder, you have to make sure that the most important thing that you realize what is it that your audience, who's your audience and what they want to listen. So, you bring in your story in a manner where they feel that they were not aware of this but, lately, you have tapped into a need which you have been able to identify just that you present it in a manner where it seems something very normal and they get attracted towards you and also, it is very deeply tied to our own inherent wish to experience new thrills. So, the moment people are exposed to something which is outside the purview of their experience they automatically get attracted to it. In brief, I think it's not really that only one particular type of people are storyteller. I think everybody here is doing storytelling, everybody is the storyteller. That is really the skill that we all should be good at if you want whatever industry we are in, if you want to thrive in that, the skill of being a good storyteller. When you think of pursuing your career then the performing arts, as you have, do you need to have a higher degree of risk-taking than some of the people who choose other professions? Do you need to have higher tolerance for ambiguity? Do you need to have a higher tolerance for failure? Which of these is true? All of them, I think. Because I've experienced a lot of time when I've been invited for corporate workshops, including the one where you invited me and this is a very regular refrain that I hear is that, oh, how brave of you that you were able to break the corporate shackles and tell whoever you are. I also want to do this. I also want to do this, but I just don't find guts enough to do this. And a lot of times, they have genuine reasons. I mean, their circumstances are such that they can't break through. But I've seen that it is also a lot of how your temperament is. Are you a risk averse person or are you a risk-favoring person? And if you are a risk-taking person, irrespective of what circumstances are, you will kind of take the leap. I think I was the risk-taking kind. I mean, my circumstances were no different. I had an alien father whom I'd take to hospital twice a week. I had a young girl four, five years old at that time and I'd not be treated or inherited a huge wealth from my parents or from my ancestors. So a lot of these circumstances were very similar. And I just took the jump. Thankfully, mercifully, people around me were very supportive of me and there was no pressure emotionally from the people around in my family. So I'm seeing that a lot depends really on what your own temperament and what your own conditioning is. I mean, a lot of people, they have grown up in cultures where their conditioning is risk-averse and they would stick to a safe choice and do a monthly check coming in their account. And some of the people we've seen in our childhood, people taking risks around us and somewhere it has seeped inside us and when our moment comes, we take that jump, we take that leap and we are able to do it. So it is there. Also, like this other question that you asked me, the tolerance to failure. I was aware when I took the leap. I did not know what my path will be. I did not know where will I end up being but I was pretty much aware that the success rate of this career choice is very low. Only 1% to 2% actually make it to a situation where they become household name or they get immense wealth. Most of the people, they kind of fall by the wayside and I was pretty aware of that. I also had some kind of a poppy confidence that I will be able to pull it off because when I started this, that was the first time I received appreciation from audiences and I realized that, okay, maybe there is something that I'm good at and it's only a question of applying myself further to become better at it and if I'm becoming better at it, the chances I will mess it up is only if I'm really foolish or stupid. Otherwise, I won't be able to. So I kind of went ahead but I was always aware that one needs to be prepared that most of the time you would be failing. You would be auditioning, you would not get the role, you would be meeting people but it would not try to find projects and that is the nature of the beast. You know, you can't really hold grudges against anybody. You just have to take it on your chin and move forward and that's what I really did. So it's also like in some sense, you have to become zen and make sure that every time there is a debacle or you are kind of failing, you make it an opportunity to learn something and reassess yourself and understand what is it that was not working for them. There's a VU and how do you get that extra skill in you to make sure that next time you have an opportunity like this, you don't fail. So all that in a sense also became an opportunity for that tolerance for failure. So instead of going down the rabbit hole that oh, I had so much expectation and I really wanted this role or I really wanted this project and then getting into depression or getting into some kind of listlessness, I'm used that opportunity to understand that what is it that was not working and then making sure that I acquired those required skills or understanding or application so that next time when I do this, I'm able to do it effectively and reduce my chances of failure. That's very important. You know, when you are talking about getting rejected from a role that you auditioned for, it's different from, you know, how when we apply for a role, you know, you're called for an interview. Yeah, which is like an audition in some sense. And somebody says, well, yeah, you are good, but there's somebody who's better. A lot of times, you know, we get upset. We are painful. We say, oh, that's a terrible company. I'm so glad I didn't make it. You know, I've heard that it's a lousy place and which also, you know, is one way of telling yourself that it wasn't me. It was actually the other person. How do actors deal with this? Because they probably go through this far more frequently than many others. Yeah, so, I mean, it's a very interesting point that you've made that, you know, job interviews very much like auditioning for a role and what you really need to understand whether you're actors or whether you are going for a job position. I would not say mistake, but I would say like a shift in focus. One of the things that we do, we are focused too much on ourselves. Do we have the skills for this job? How would I present myself in the interview? Will I be able to answer everything correctly? And I think that is really the wrong focus. I mean, that is actually true, but that's really not the complete story. And one of the things which I tell young actors when I meet them is this, that, you know, getting a role is really not about how good an actor you are. Getting a role is really about capturing the imagination of the filmmakers. So what is the imagination that the filmmakers have? What is it they are looking for? What is it that in their head fits the role? And if you are able to read that correctly, you will be able to capture their imagination and get the role. So I think same goes with job interviews rather than focusing on what my strengths are, what my skills are. What is the imagination that the interviewers have, the company people have? What in their imagination is the person who would fit this role? And if you're able to understand that, which comes with a little research, you go around finding out what kind of people are in these positions, what kind of people were successful in these positions. The more you kind of do that and understand what is it exactly that is on their minds and you fit that role, your chances of getting that role would be much higher rather than whether do I have the requisite skill set or not. Because at the end of the day, as we keep moving up the echelons and the hierarchies, it's really not so much about the skill, it's really more about people management. It's really more about managing different aspirations and egos. It's really about reading the room correctly. It's really about reading the market correctly. It's really about reading the trends correctly. It's really about finding that foothold somewhere in future where the sand is not defined and you don't know where you will land. Will you land on a water or will you land on the sand? But able to envisage that foothold and then take everyone towards that foothold and making that into a reality is really the kind of thing which brings people around you which kind of attract people towards you. So I think whether you're auditioning for a role or you're going for a job interview whether we have the requisite skill sets or not, it is really understanding what is the winning proposition for the people who are the stakeholders and then capture their imagination and become that person which as for them would lead them into that future. You know, I was reading your biography on IMDB. It talks about you're running your own theater company The Hoshruba Repertoire in Mumbai and your productions being guard to the Taj Kisaul Duki Akhiri Kitabka and resides of course the ongoing storytelling project Kisebazi and the poetry performance project called Poetryification with fellow actor Denzil Smith. In my book I talk about this as a classic career 3.0 where you are earning your revenue from multiple different ecosystems and you started off with a traditional career 1.0 as a banker. Then you kind of jubbled theater on the side and you know which is like a career 2.0 your side gig then becomes something you monetize that now you're on this. You know when you think about this model of earning from multiple revenue streams you're doing theater, you're working in Netflix films you're doing various things. Is it that people who are better that time management managed to do this are there people who are better that building networks across ecosystems who are good at doing this who are the people who can manage career 3.0 well. Well I wish I was earning the kind of money as it sounds from you when you talk about me but I think one thing which I have personally realized is that tech really offers a greater opportunity to earn money and to kind of strengthen our position and in multiple ecosystems. So I think when people are looking for a 3.0 kind of a career where they are in multiple ecosystems and they want to make sure it's just like your traditional entrepreneur who's into let's say FMCG also but at the same time he's also into some kind of a industry to industry set up where he's kind of into mining or something else and not directly going to the customer. So you have these conglomerates who who are into various industries and a lot of these industries do not have synergies in that sense they are not complementary industries they are absolutely different industries in terms of the end products or in terms of what they are serving and they're thriving everywhere these conglomerates at the individual level it also becomes something like this and one of the ways I've found realized is that you must be able to understand how to use tech effectively especially if you want to reach out because you know your physical reach is always limited by the number of people you can meet or the area where you operate but tech offers you you know internet offers you the opportunity to like really scale up those numbers. So if you find ways of tapping technology to your advantage then you could reach a system or a situation where you just have to put out your stuff out there and then the technology takes care of it by distributing it by disseminating it by making sure it reaches out to a larger number and then it automatically starts getting monetized and you would find that you don't have to spend that much effort so I think in that case the brand building becomes very that build a certain brand which attracts across multiple ecosystems and people are like oh no this is very interesting and this person is saying something here also then that also is very interesting and let's go there also to kind of understand how to package what you're offering you know some medium you could do log form packages some medium you need to go you know shorter versions shorter consumable packages and then pitch it correctly and then once you've kind of get the hack of it you can go into these multiple ecosystems because you know exactly what system wants what you've been asked to brand and then you just put across your stuff and the medium itself the technology itself takes care of it you know you start reaping also I think the other important thing is to understand how IPRs you've been a poet as well and I would love to have you recite some of your poetry for our listeners you know so it'll be great if you can you know recite something for us sure absolutely this one is called a plane landscape in order to exist you must be on earth on a plane landscape rooted at a spot from where it seems all earth does is converge to your being to your standing skill the sky is a very giant caught on the rock foot shedding a load off his shoulders in order to exist you must be on earth on a plane landscape with no shallow pits no open caves no revines no rifts no ridges no crevices not even human architecture no prose poem or memory not even a tittle tattle tale because to enter an opening a doorway or a text means to exit you're gone you cease to exist thank you beautiful that was lovely and thank you so much I'll just read one more which is more like Hindi one is it okay if I read the Hindi one sure yes of course well it's called etihaas ki karar ye baat sach hai ke sab yahudi ho se nafrat nahi karte thay kuch mokha paras thay keval satta ke sath hi dekthe thay kuch low blalaj ki hor meh sif lootne ki chah hakti thay kuch majboor aadeesh anusar bataye rah par hi jalsakthe thay kuch rose marra ke bhawar meh bhasay apni rai tak nahi rakthe thay to kuch rajnaitik chakal ka ek daar aaj kuch kal kuch aur samasthe thay par afsos etihaas ki kagar par ye sab janafrat nahi karte thay eki laghi se naap hi jate hain sab naadzee kya laate hain thank you wow wow what does the future look like when you think a couple of years ahead what are you thinking of doing what are the plays you're working on talk to me about that to be very honest I think the future is pretty bleak because you know I see climate change happening I see and all these wars that you're looking at around us I mean eventually these are wars for resources and these are wars to exclude as many people as you want and only a handful of people really want to have their hands on these resources so I think this will aggravate as we move forward situations become tough I don't know where he will all be in this scenario as of now I want to tell stories that I want to tell I want to tell stories which possibly sensitize people to what is happening around us I want to tell stories about what sensitize people about our own understanding of who we are as human beings maybe create something which if not transformative is able to affect people to a degree where it compels them if not changes them it compels them to ask questions to themselves and to those around them and you've done a play about Sahid with Yannvi right by keeping track of poets tell me a little about that work it's a new play that we've done it's called it's written by Meera Ali Usain and Himanshu Bhashbhai I mean these are two friends of mine I basically got a script written by Meera Ali Usain by Ali G. Kolabita Talwar who runs this organization called Arts for Causes and she said she felt if I could make something out of it when I read the script I felt it needs a little more because Ali had written it as a monologue in first person and I felt Sahid being such a complex enigmatic personality you know I need to bring in other voices to make it a more 360 degree kind of a presentation on his life so I went to Himanshu who was Dastan on Sahid I'd seen graciously these gentlemen agreed to give me a card blanche on their script so I chopped, edited took portions from one and just structured the whole thing into a play and we opened in September to a grand success and now we have the new year lined up which shows in Bombay, Delhi and Hyderabad including a show at the National School of Drama's Bharat Ranma Utsap the annual prestigious theater festival and we are excited and we are hoping that the size is such a grand life and such a fearless speaker of truth that we are able to do justice to the great poet and bring his life on stage to people and maybe people will go out of the auditorium more curious about Sahid and perhaps if nothing else then at least look for his songs on their playlists What is a dialogue from the play that has stayed with you if I were to ask you to sort of say that a line that encapsulates this kind of, you know How was it? I was sure that the land that I had since the last two years since I have learnt it now it is time to break the chain I was very poetic and beautifully written and also one line that I stayed back where one side's poor and I am impoverished poor, poor, poor poet friends comes and he is not able to help him and he is where he kind of takes off his coat and gives it to his friend because he can't really kick him any money he also doesn't have any money and he says at the end of it I decided I didn't want to be poor and I think, you know and that line just simple but comes with so much conviction I decided I didn't want to be poor Which translated roughly means I decided that I don't want to stay poor Yes, yes and fair enough I mean he rose to great heights both in terms of his popularity and fame and also in terms of the money he earned He was one of the most powerful writers of his times and Dhanesh it's we are coming up to the art and I just want to say thank you very much and wish you the very best for your career as a performer as a storyteller as an actor and the career three-dollar life that you are needing I hope it will inspire many more people to wish you this kind of a combination Thank you so much for being here Thank you Abhijit Thank you for getting me on the show I hope you know your listeners enjoy our conversation and I look forward to connecting with you again Look forward to that