in conversation with purab kohli
Purab Kohli in conversation with Mark Shayler, at Camp Good Life in September 2021.
I didn't know Purab until five weeks ago. I was chatting about love and being a bit of a hippie with Charlie Gladstone at the last Camp Good Life, and Purab kept coming over and joining us. I thought, I really like this bloke. Somehow, every time everything stopped and I had a bit of a gap, Purab was there. I thought, this man has been sent to me for a reason and I don't know what it is and I still don't know what it is, but I really like him. Purab, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.
Mainly, I just like to eat good food. But I'm essentially an actor. That's what I do. But to be honest, I think I just act because I know how to do it and I get some work in, so I act. But I do many things, and I'm always finding the next thing to do. I keep moving around to see what I can do next. I've been an actor for 25 years. I act in Indian films. I don't like the word Bollywood too much because it sort of makes you think of a very commercial kind of film, that we call masala, what you have in your curries, the masala. We call masala Bollywood films and I have done some of that. But there's so many layers to Indian cinema and I’m lucky to be a part of some of those layers. I do Indian films mainly, though I have done some things in the west. You can search me on Netflix and see some things that I've done. I did a show called Sense 8 on Netflix which some of you might have seen.
I'm going to start with those same three questions that I ask everyone. Your childhood, tell me what it tasted like? Tell me what your childhood smelled like? And tell me what it sounded like?
Well, I think if you've been to India, you know that India can be overwhelming, especially when you come from a city like Bombay. It’s called Mumbai now, but initially it was Bombay. Hence the term Bollywood because of the B in Bombay. Official figures are 21 million, but I think it's close to 30 million people in Bombay. I've grown up there. Surrounded by lots of people, lots of sounds, lots of flavors. India is the land of spices. You can smell spice all over and I notice it all the more now, since I've been living in London since 2018. If you asked me this question three years ago, I probably would've answered it differently, but now, when I go back home, I can smell things, hear things, and feel things and taste things more distinctly because I miss it now. When I go back it's suddenly like, "Whoa, I miss this and I want to go and eat this particular thing or hear this sound." I grew up by the sea, the part of Bombay that I lived in is on the coast, and has three beautiful coastlines. So the sounds of the sea, the sound of people.
Bombay's a small city, in terms of area, unlike London which is quite widespread. You have houses here. In Bombay, we have apartment blocks. Lots of tall buildings with lots of people, lots of flats. I grew up in an apartment block which had 48 flats. My family, my father, still lives in that building. The sounds would be of 25, 30 children playing every day down in the compound, which is something that we don't even see now in India anymore because you have television and other sources of entertainment and classes that kids go to, but when we were growing up, in my childhood, you heard your name being called when you came back from school from some kid down, shouting out, "Purab, Purab." You would go running down and then for the next three hours, you'd be playing down in the compound.
So sounds were of people playing and people having fun, calling out to each other from the windows. Smells, of course, lots of spicy smells. Taste, lots of spice, lots of chili. I think my tolerance of chili has gone down because of my wife and my children. They don't eat much chili. And my mother's visiting actually right now, she's in London with our children. I have to keep telling her, "Hold back, hold back." because even I can't eat the chili anymore. I remember with my friends, we would have competitions of biting into the green chili and seeing how long you could eat it for.
It's interesting that you use the word, the term Bombay and I avoid it like the plague, because it feels like it's been a given term and Mumbai, the natural term.
I've noticed this across not just myself, but people who were born in the city before the name changed, which I think was in the late 90s or mid 90s, tend to call it Bom. If you were born before that, then Bombay is the city you were born in and then it became Mumbai. I think people from my times call it Bombay and people who moved. Bombay essentially is an immigrant city. I love it. It's one of my favorite cities in the world. It's a city that only really became a city in the late 1800s. Before that it was just seven islands that the Portuguese controlled in British India. Then the Portuguese gave it to the British and the British just saw the quality of it being a port and built it and connected all the landmass and built a city. So it's quite a new city for the size, the amount of people that it has, the kind of money it makes. For a long period of time, if you ever wanted to grow a business or start a business or do anything in India, you needed to move to Bombay. That was the city that you did it in. Now, of course it has changed, but very recently. I don't know if these are facts or not, but it’s always been said that Bombay pays 80% of tax of the whole country. It's changed now, but when we were growing up, that was the talk. It's rich in many ways. It's an amazing city. London shocks me sometimes. I walk around at 8:30-9 in the night and I find it quite dead compared to what Bombay is. Bombay is buzzing till like four, five in the morning.
Why did you want to leave?
Acting is my main job. But as I said, I do many things. There was a period in my life when I did a lot of travel shows and I hosted, I worked for a music channel and for eight years, I traveled through the whole country. I was just always on the move. I was a VJ for channel V, which was the big MTV of India. I did travel shows for them. Different kinds of travel shows, budget shows, luxury shows, road trips, lots of them that I did over eight years. And then I reached a point where I did a really long show where I was out for four and a half or five months. I came back and I think... So the suburb I grew up in, it was the first suburb. The queen of suburbs, it was called while I was growing up. But now today, it's the center of Bombay. It's probably the most expensive real estate in India. It became really popular because lots of actors started living in it. And then everybody from other parts of the country wanted to live there. It's quite cool. It's called Bandra. So if you ever visit Bombay, people will tell you to go and visit Bandra, it's quite popular.
I came back from that four and a half month trip, and I just found it quite busy. I just found there were lots of people around and I thought, I have a job that doesn't require me to live in this city anymore. I felt like I needed to do it a service and step away from it, so the city was one person less. It sounds a bit silly, but I just really honestly felt that. I can go back whenever I have to work, because my job requires me to be in a project for two months, three months, and then I can leave. My holiday spot was Goa, and I just made that my home and would go back to Bombay to work. That was in 2011.
Goa has many parts to it. When people think about Goa, they always associate it with a big party, because there is the Northern side which has all the parties. I think it offers a lot of freedom that the rest of the country might not offer. Simple things like being on a beach for a woman in her swimsuit. I don't think you can do that anywhere else comfortably in India, besides Goa. Goa has that side to it, but then there's also another side. Not too many people know that a lot of Goa is natural forest, natural reserves, and national parks. There's a tiger park.
If you understand how the whole park system works, especially in India, if it becomes a tiger park, it's the highest protection that the natural reserve gets. So, there's a tiger park in Goa. That's a big status. It takes a long time to acquire that even for wardens of the park, who are trying to sort of woo the government not to come in and mine the land or cut down forests. Tiger park status is like the biggest status you get and then everything gets protected. There's a lot of village rivers, hills, great natural flora and fauna. You talk about India, you talk about Nepal. You talk about the Himalayan range, which is the big, tall mountains of the world. But on the Western side of India is a very, very old mountain range, much older than the Himalayas called the Western Ghats or the Sahyadri range which goes all the way down to Kerala, into the south, extreme south and starts in Gujarat, higher up in the north. A large part of it is in Goa. The flora and fauna in the Sahyadri ranges is... You don't see it anywhere else in the world. It's quite special in that way, Goa. There's the attitude there also, the traditional Goan attitude is a bit laid back, which I kind of like. People think of it as being non-ambitious. I'm not a spokesperson person really for the Goans, but I think they are ambitious, but there's also a certain attitude of, I don't care. It's not so important. They’re sort of like, "I'm just laid back and I'm happy with what I have."
Are these two different sides of you, Purab? Is that there's this hustle, this entrepreneur, to be a VJ in a population of a billion to rise to the top of your profession and then to seek the beach and the calm. Are these two parts of you?
I think there are many parts to everybody. Right? Many parts to all of us and it's really what we spend our energy exploring. I'm not a trained actor. I never went to acting school. I come from a family of filmmakers and it sort of just fell in my lap and I had nothing to do and I said, "All right, let's try this and make some money." It was a weekend job that I did , really. The first show I did, a director saw me at my aunt's party and said, "I'm looking for someone new and I want you to come and audition." So I said, "All right. Okay." My aunt literally pushed me and forced me saying, "You're not doing anything your mother's really worried about you. Go and do this audition."
She told my mom and they pushed me together. So I went to audition and the next thing I knew, they called me in and said, "You've been selected." So I went with two of my friends and we were going for a movie and I asked them to wait outside, I was going to go in and tell them I didn’t want the role. So my two friends were sitting in the car outside. I was 17 years old. I walked in and the whole cast was sitting there. I didn't know how to say no in front of everybody. So I sat down and I said, "Okay, this will be over soon and after it’s over, I'll say I don't want to do it." An hour went by. Two hours went by. I realised then that they had called us in for this first initial meeting and they were telling us what the program was. They assumed that you came for the audition, so you wanted to do this and now you've got it. We were all untrained actors. That was the thing they wanted. They wanted to train us. So they wanted fresh meat really, wanted to polish us, like uncut gems, into these actors for their TV show.
By the end of it, I realized that everybody else in the room was just like me. So why didn't I want to do this? I said, "All right, okay. This seems like it might be fun." And it was. We were young kids. We were all in school, in college. So they said, "We are going to film only on weekends, so it doesn't interrupt any of your studies and you can go on and do your thing through the week, then come on the weekend and work for us."
I knew two of the other people in the room, two other actors who were cast. One of them was in college with me and one was a friend who I knew from school. So I was like, “Cool, these guys are here. I think I'll have fun with them." And I started doing that show and that show went on to become really popular, like really really popular. 25 years later, I still get called that character's name. When people see me on the street, they'll call me "Mazhar."
My friends were really pissed off, they were like, " Where the f@#K were you for so long." They didn't even know where I had gone because I disappeared into this building. But they're good friends of mine. They're still good friends. They laugh about that now. And 25 years later, I'm still doing the same job. I don't regret it at all. Had I gone in alone for that meeting, I would've probably said, "I don't want to do it." and left because I don't think they were sitting there to convince anybody who didn't want to be there. Seeing everybody there, feeling the energy of everybody… I just knew I wanted to be there.
I’ve sidetracked here, but I was trying to explain that I try to rediscover a new side of myself with every job, because that's the technique I use as an actor. I try to live a part. I try to feel the part I get cast in. I think about things like, what kind of exercise would that person do? I start sometimes from places they might like or what kind of artwork he would see, or what kind of clothes he would wear and imagine that, or start wearing that and start feeling that and so on...
I don't think about it very much. I just start doing it and I start trying to sort of live it. I moved to Goa for a part, because there was a director I worked with in 2010 and he had another film that he was making and the character was actually a man who moves to Goa. So I did. That film never happened because he couldn't get funding for it and it sort of disappeared, but I've always tried to do that. Then even after the film, I just feel that I've become that character in some way, you know?
One of the things I feel quite proud about having done many characters, that all my characters start differently, they look different, they feel different. I change as a person every time I do a part, I try my best. Now, especially with living in London and how expensive it is, that luxury I'm losing. But in India I would do very little work. I would do a project a year, maybe two. Now I'm moving faster from project to project.
I like to take time in between and become the character, sometimes a part comes to you and the director has not thought of how he wants the character. He wants you to work on the character. So then you offer a new side of yourself to the character you are playing. That's my technique. Other actors, who're better actors than me, can act it out easily. I find it hard.
Do you ever forget who you are?
No, I don't. You're finding new sides to yourself. So that's still you, it's not trying to be somebody else. You're authentically and honestly finding and rediscovering sides to your own self and what you are about and who you really are. So it's a constant journey. What you have been, you can retain some aspects of that and hold onto it and that's great. Some things even come from characters. You read a script sometimes and you're like, "Wow, I really like that about the part. And I want to incorporate that into myself."
Do you feel like you're doing the thing that you were always supposed to do?
I do feel that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do because I love it. I love the camera. So people ask me, "Why don't you do any theater?" I have done some theater, but I love being on a film set. As I said, I come from a family of filmmakers. I'm the third generation of filmmakers in my family. I walk into a set and I'm just so comfortable in it. Even before I knew I wanted to be an actor. That first TV show I did aired in 1998. I didn’t decide I wanted to be an actor until 2005, seven years into my acting career. Up until that point it was just like, "Oh wow, this is fun. I'm going to make some money. Let's go ahead and do it." I didn't know how to act. I didn't know how to host shows on television. I was doing all of that for those seven years. And then I did a film, which is on Netflix, and I feel very proud of it. It’s called My Brother Nikhil. It's loosely based on a true life story in the 80s about the first publicly acclaimed HIV case in India. At that point of time in India, if you tested HIV positive, you were arrested and put into close confinement. Not only in India, I think in many parts of the world, because people are so fearful of the unknown. They didn’t know what to do with you. The director of the film was a great filmmaker. He was an editor for the documentary on a story of someone, and he sort of incorporated that into a film. It's a beautiful film. When I saw that film on the screen, I was really like, "Wow, this is the power of cinema. This is what it can do and how it impacts people." I don't play Nikhil, I play his lover. This is at a time when homosexuality was illegal in India. You could be arrested and put into prison if you were caught being gay. The laws have changed only recently. So when I saw that film and saw the audiences that they played it for; communities affected by HIV and LGBT+ communities, I realised how powerful cinema could be. And that’s when I decided to be an actor.
As I said, I was always very comfortable on a set. I know the language well. I know how cameras work. I know how light works and it comes very naturally to me. I think because it's in the blood. It's sort of in your DNA, you, your family. Sometimes the script comes to me and I look at the screenplay and say, "It's really shit." I give suggestions saying you should change this, I think it'll have a better impact. Some of them take it and they've changed their screenplay. So I think that kind of tells you that you're comfortable in a space you know well and move around in.
You might have found who you are, but I don't think you've found where you're going to be yet. What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?
I don't know, I'm just sort of going with the flow, really. When I left Bombay and moved to Goa, I was very happy chugging away. My wife came along, and then my daughter came along. At that point, we were long distance. I was in Goa and Bombay and Lucy was in London. We got pregnant and my daughter was born nine months later. And then Lucy and I, and our lovely daughter, when she was three months old, moved to Bombay because I got onto this television project. A television project means every day, work for a year. We're shooting on a set, 12 hours a day. It's a lot of hard work. So Lucy comes over to Bombay, lives in Bombay with me for a year and a half. Then we moved back to Goa again. And she says, "I think I want to live in Bombay. I don't want to live in Goa." and I was like, "All right. Okay. I don't want to go back to Bombay." So London somehow became the middle ground. I’m just going with the flow and seeing what happens in life.
Purab Kohli