Way back in 1994, I happened to watch a documentary film called The Clap Trap 1993) at the MIFF in Mumbai. She was an alumnus of FTII but stories went around that she had migrated to Canada after this film and was never heard of again in relation to the film industry.

The film featured the life stories of two major junior artistes in Mumbai, one a man with a hero-like body and the other a woman. Both of them confessed that they had entered into films with dreams of making it big. The man had also landed himself the role of hero in his first film. “But the film was never made and after waiting for another dream role for some months, I began to accept bit roles in big films,” he says. He is one among the higher hierarchy of extras and maintains a telephone in his small flat where he lives with his wife and children. “It was destiny that came in my way and who can I blame for it, tell me?” he asks, philosophically. The film shows how while ‘selecting’ females for a certain scene, the agent or his crew ignore the older women in favour of the younger ones even when older women are called for. “It’s because we cannot give it to them,” says one brutally candid old woman into the camera. And this is a pointer to the bed hopping the girls have to do in order to get that ‘bit’ role.

More than Ink: What Tattoos say about characters in Indian films

When the camera becomes a character in Indian cinema

From strict disciplinarians to system reformers; How teachers have evolved in Indian Cinema

Marathi film Sthal: When a girl is put on display for marriage

Do you know that Prabhu Deva and Kamal Hassan began their career as “extras”? You probably do not because over time, these two managed to step out of the crowd scenes or dance choruses to make it big and how! Who is an “extra”? An ‘extra’ is an actor who must have stepped into films with dreams of becoming “Amitabh Bachchan” but when after years of walking through the studios, greasing the palms of arrogant door-guards, being slapped around by chamchas of stars, he found himself reduced to becoming one person in a crowd in a scene shooting a “morcha” or a crowd shooting a “mill strike” or a “death” procession. No one anywhere in the film industry except some of his close colleagues, knows him by name. He lives a hand-to-mouth existence in a chawl with wife and kids and is used to the........

© Mathrubhumi English