I am back in Bombay now and considering how I just sat in a total of three hours of traffic today I can say that not much has changed from three years ago.
Bombay is the site of a particular piece of my solo show, Queens Girl. And because while writing and performing it the sites and sounds have danced around in my imagination being in Bombay has been somewhat surreal. It is like visiting the site of your favorite film. While driving past the Taj, Marine Drive and other places in South Bombay — all which were where turning points in my life took place — my face is stuck to the window. “Oh, that is where THAT happened.”
Back for more!
Since this is where I decided to become an full-time actor, coming back to work on a film has been mind-blowing and surreal. Just a few years ago I remember sitting on a bus with my supervisor, telling her that I was not sure what to do with my life. My non-profit experience in India had thrown my a curve ball and I was not sure what to do, although I had this nagging urge to become a performer. A few years later I am staying at her place in Bombay having just wrapped a film in Gujarat. Crazy.
I am leaving Bombay tomorrow. Last night my friend Nakul and I went for a drive down Marine Drive for one last time. Through the pain and fever of a sinus infection that got worse throughout the night I marveled at how beautiful this city is in the quiet of night. Minimal traffic and little noise — just quiet road and beautiful architecture. The Queen’s Necklace stretched out before us in a sensual, captivating arch. I was sad because I am not sure when I am going to see it again. But as India, like any torrid love affair, is a place that I both love and hate with equal passion, although I may leave quite exhausted from the experience, I know that I can’t help but come back. Like when I left last time — I don’t know when or how, but India has still not seen the last from me.
This is my second time in India and I hope to be back (hopefully for work) sometime in the near future. Not that I want to live here, because I can not live without the subway and fresh salads, but I love it enough to come back another time.
Why?
I have been asking myself the same question. Being in India, especially in the urban areas, is no cake-walk. The sensory experience is overwhelming and usually involves a decrepit and/or decapitated homeless person, smog, rotting garbage and three slums for every high rise or fancy mall. Infrastructure, if it ever existed, seems to be crumbling around you and there is an air of Armeggedon that infests the urban areas.
You can try to insulate yourself with grandeur and luxury but you still have to go outside. Even if you have an air conditioned car and driver drop you off at the nearest five star hotel you still have to sit in traffic! As one of my native Bombayite friends who has traveled around the world said: “Let’s face facts, in India you can have as many maidservants as you want to do everything but wipe your ass, but once you leave you house it sucks.”
Well, then why do I keep coming back? I have been to lots of other places but none has called me back except for India (and Italy). Besides for my love of South Indian (I could live on Idlis and Dosa) and Indian-Chinese food, the thing about India that makes the hassle worth it is the people. The generosity of folks here is unmatched anywhere. For example, my first night here I was sitting around with some folks that a fellow actor brought to dinner. I mentioned that I needed a phone for my sim card. Within ten minutes someone took out their sim and handed over their phone. “I have a bunch of phones at home. It’s fine. Keep it.”
My friend Jonathan, a non-profit worker, and I were chatting this morning about the spirit of generosity and hospitality in India. Common American phrases such as: “I owe you a dollar.” and “Can I have a bite of your food?” seem absurd to us after spending time here. It is common in India to have one friend pick up a dinner check for a few — because we are all friends and what goes around comes around. And the first thing you do when you get a place of food is to offer some to everyone around you. From my experience there is not this divide and counting of what is mine and yours and who did what and how much as there often is in the US. My favorite Kannada (South Indian) saying is (roughly translated) “Between friends there is no owe.”
My friends in India astound me with their generosity. For example, the place where I am staying is my old supervisor’s place. Originally she was going to be out of town while I was here, but was nonplussed about it: “I will leave the key with the guard at my office. Come and pick it up when you get into town, and then come and go as you like.” My old buddies in Bangalore have been calling me saying: “Why the hell aren’t you here? You know that we would have put you up!”
Sharing and generosity often comes in the form of food. A visitor will never go hungry in India as you are offered tea, a snack and a meal at every house visit. Zenobia, a fellow actress on the shoot and a Bombayite, said to me: “Even the poorest people will share their last piece of bread with you.”
After my previous time in India I remember the readjustment process. It was difficult to not interpret the lack of Indian-style generosity among my American friends and family as rude. After settling into life in the States I started to forget what India taught me about generosity and abundance. I commonly got anxious about not having enough and was focused on what I didn’t have instead of how much I can share with others. Being in India now has reminded me that worrying and stressing is futile because, duh, I have more than enough and that if I live with that in mind than I will always have more than I need. Generosity is the daily exercise.
Remind me of this when I am stressing out back at home!
Actor Patel is more than a person. More than an actor, really. He is an experience. He is the kind of guy to blast Hindi music at seven in the morning, break out in dance and song for no apparent reason and incessantly take pictures of nothing at all. I tried to video him to give all my readers a taste of what he is like, but he froze because he was speaking to a camera and not to his audience, which is really anybody and everybody who is surrounding him.
Actor Patel (who really calls himself Actor Patel — we call him “Actor” for short) played a character in the movie I was shooting in India. He was not staying at Vijay Vilas, the lovely beach resort where most of the actors were, and was instead was sucking it up as a shabby joint. At dinner the second night Actor told me how he has not been sleeping well. Beore I could stop myself an offer to take up a bunk in Grant’s, a fellow actor’s, room, flew out of my mouth. Grant almost threw a fork in my direction. That night Grant, the poor guy, was only able to get to sleep with the help of an Ambien, a blasting IPod and a pillow over his head. That was after Actor Patel made him partake in a photo shoot that included a lap top as a prop.
The next morning the cast discovered something very important about Actor: you can tell him to shut up. At breakfast he started going on a ramble that was half Gujrati, part Hindi and somewhat English (note: people who speak all of these languages fluently find him hard to follow because most of it is muttered) and Zenobia, who played his boss in the movie (character traits sometime follow you off screen) turned to him and said “Chotu [his name in the movie], be quiet!” And, miraculously he did. That was because he has a heart of gold and about the size of a football field. You can poke fun of him and he doesn’t mind — a long as he knows that you are his friend.
Look a joke with no hands!
This is not to say that at our discovery that he is a sweet guy Actor stopped being irritating. The offers for life insurance (he sells it as a side gig — a dollar a day if you are under thirty!), puns that make no sense and a constant plee for attention all grated on our nerves. But, because he is a good person he was able to, as Grant put it, “worm his way into our hearts and infest our brains”. When filming was over Actor had to visit family somewhere else in Gujarat (however, Actor currently resides in New Jersey and is available for performance bookings all over the tri-state area which you can read about on his Facebook page) so was the first to leave. The remaining cast and crew spent a day at Vijay Vilas resort without him and the experience was not quite the same (although more peaceful). Actor told me before he left: “I am like a perfume — sometimes too strong, but when it fades out you miss it.” Yeah, we missed him.
At the end of my last trip to India I had written:
“Leaving India tomorrow and although I love India it is really time to just get the heck out of here. I’m tired of the crowds and the traffic, tired of malnourished children or people with 2 or more serious deformities hovering all over the street asking for money, tired of being stared at by gross men, tired of yelling all day every day and just plain tired.”
This trip has been different. My last two weeks in India are summarized by the photographs below of the beach in front of the resort and palace grounds which are five minutes away from where we were housed.
What do these two pictures have in common?
Vijay Vilas Palace grounds
The beach.
1st guess:
They are both taken on the property of Vijay Vilas Palace in Gujarat, India where I was working on an Indy flick for about two weeks.
That was the easy answer….now look closer.
What I am getting at is what you don’t see —
There are no people! No crowds, smog or pollution! Quiet stretches of clean nature and serene surroundings.
The Vijay Vilas establishment, also the location of the epic Lagaan is on private land so is isolated from the common experience of India. While staying there every day I got to run, walk or do yoga on an empty beach and let myself be bored in the quiet without internet or phone. When we began filming the big extravaganza scenes which included the use of 150 extras, two camels and a floating jetty the experience began to feel a bit more familiar. Still, after we wrapped the camels, people and set left the scene and we were again alone with a lot of sand and stars to contemplate.
Living in India was the first time that I had no one around telling me what to do/who to be. After college I rebelled from a conservative Republican family by moving to San Francisco. The problem with the Bay Area is that everyone agrees with each other, so there is a lack of critical thinking and serious passion. I went to India and learned something that the liberal mafia nor Howard Beach Italians would never let me admit: it is OK to manipulate the system to get what you want. Here is an old blog post from that time when I was finally was able to put on a corset and get out on the runway. Posted in post-fashion week enthusiasm.
“A friend-of-a-friend in Calcutta is a designer who got into Indian fashion week for the 1st time. Friends of theirs were going there to help out so I tagged along. I was essentially an errand boy for them and did stuff like hang up clothes and get people breakfast, but in exchange got to wear designer clothes all week, see tons of runway shows that most people just watch on F-TV(India’s 24 hour fashion network that shows mostly runway shows) and go to lots of parties with the “beautiful people” of Bombay. You’d think that I would be disgusted by the whole ensemble of starved models, sleazy agents, uptight designers and pathetic flunkeys, but by the end of my 1st runway show I was sold on the Bombay fashion industry. 1) Bombay is by far the best city in India 2) runway shows are a performance of sorts. Like drag people are performing gender. and 3) the schmoozing is so ridiculous that you cant help but see it too as a performance. Everyone is running around kissing each other’s ass and trying to move up the ladder, and you need good acting skills to pull it off. Its all just pretend for business purposes and the best actor wins!”
After five months in India things started to change:
“Why I’ve Turned Into a Walking Cliche
For those who knew me as I was in the U.S. you know that I always had a 3 year plan, if not a 5 year life plan. Future plans were not to be fucked with; mine were always delicately planned and thoroughly researched. Although coming to India might have seemed crazy and irresponsible to some, it was actually an essential part of the 5-year plan to get into public health school and begin working in the public health field.
After 5 months in India something has rubbed off on me. I hate to say it, but I’ve had the cliché ‘come-to-India-and-have-a-life-altering-experience’ experience. It gets me mad, because I routinely make fun of the hippie back-packer types who come to India in search of an ashram, guru, and spiritual enlightenment or life-altering experience. For the 1st time ever I have no plan for the future other than going back to NY. For hours I think about what I want to do, but what keeps coming up is feeling that everything is bullshit and that nothing matters.
To illustrate this point: My friend Piali told me a story recently about seeing a dead human body in the middle of the street with its brains splattered all over the place like a puss from a popped pimple. What had happened is that the dude had fallen over his bike and a bus had run him over, causing enough pressure for his brains to explode out of his skull. You are forced to confront the reality that something can happen to fuck up your life or kill you at any second. In a place where a physical disability means that you will have to live your life begging on the streets, life takes on a whole new meaning. Even more frustrating and hard to deal with is that among this social context you have NGOs/non-profits who care more about getting donations and appeasing their donors than about the people they serve, and NGO employees who care more about their careers than the issues that they claim to work for. At this point everything seems like bullshit and as for what the hell I am going to do with myself when I get back to the US I’m just trying to figure out what I enjoy doing and will just work with that. Don’t say that I didn’t warn ‘ya If I end up being a garbage collector or corporate office worker.”
A few years ago I was lucky to receive the William J. Clinton Fellowship for Service in India. I spent a tumultuous, unpredictable year working with an NGO in Bangalore, India. The insanity is summed up by the following facts:
I went to India an indy punk, grubby, non-consumerist, teacher and public service worker.
I left India an aspiring actress and model ready to delve into the commercial entertainment world.
Not the stereotypical travel-to-India-life-changing-journey. Before leaving India I wrote:
“CONCLUSION: IT ALL WAS NOT THAT BAD
Although there were a lot of hard times in India, things ended up working out. I was told that if one at least likes India the country will keep calling you back. The future is uncertain, but I am sure that this is not the last that India has heard from me.“
Funny how life happens – this Wednesday I will be traveling to India as part of the cast of “When Harry Tries to Marry” to finish up filming. My life changed so much the first time, who knows what will happen with a repeat voyage? To prepare you, my reader, for this voyage every day until lift-off I am going to post some of the highlights from my previous India travel-blog. The posts ended up being quite popular so trust me, you’ll love them!
To start off:
“Top Ten Reasons Why Living in India is Memorable
10) You can bribe your way out of anything.
9) If you are here long enough you will make sounds with you butt that you never thought possible.
Mob rule wins every time. The population is so huge that even if you get a small percentage to agree with you that’s a damn lot of people.
7) South Bombay socialites excluded, people are not afraid to eat.
6) In a city like Bangalore with 6 million people there are still cows meandering in the middle of the road.
5) Cleaning toilets, sweeping floors, ironing clothes and swabbing floors are seen as work- real work, like it should be. And you usually pay someone to do it.
4) Salman Khan, a famous Bollywood actor, ran over a few homeless people and walked away scot-free, but then shot an endangered animal and went straight to the slammer.
3) The world is your toilet and nature is your piss pot.
2) Someone who dances like a back-up dancer from a 1985 Michael Jackson video can be a top hip-hop dance teacher in Bombay with over 50 loyal students.
1) The leader of the largest political party in India, who runs and controls a lot of the shit going on around here, Ms. Sonia Gandhi, is I-T-A-L-I-A-N.”
Around 9:30pm last Sunday, as I was watching “Inside the Actor’s Studio”, my phone rang. I am not a fan of answering my phone on Sunday night but the call was from a nameless indy filmmaker so I was curious. I received a proposition. Since I am pretty fearless he thought I might consider being “gangster” and “collaborating” with them to help make a PR scam to springboard the career of a soon-to-be famous model. The scam was to create a fake sex tape, inspired by the Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee genre of the 90s. I was promised that it would be “artful” (Pamela was artful?) and only reveal body parts and kissing.
Now, there was no way in hell I was going to do this. Besides the fact that I don’t want to be involved with shadiness my mother would kill me. Because even though anonymity would be “guaranteed”, I have one jillion cousins around the world who would somehow find out. My mother in particular scours the internet morning and night to find every little thing that I have ever done. She has found projects posted that I thought it never made it to the final editing stages. How could I ever explain that I thanked her for her support with a vain attempt at a scandalous PR hoax? Also, I could never say yes to this project because I like the filmmaker who-shall-remain-nameless, and would like to ensure his safety as there is nothing like the wrath of an angry Italian mother. Not to mention brother, father, uncles, cousins…
At the end of this phone conversation I asked out of curiosity: “How much?” The answer I got included lots of stuttering and delay tactics, which makes me believe that the usual low-budget indie-film rules will apply. Meaning that after the interns the actors will be the least paid people on set. Oh, but it’s for the art! Sometimes it is, but not in this case.
I spent the rest of the night thinking…well, if I wanted to, how much would I do it for? I’m still not sure, but how much would you make a sex tape for? Leave a comment and let me know!
For the first two days aboard the Norwegian Spirit as part of the Sweet Cruise I was confused. Why does everyone look like they are having so much fun? I still had not gotten over my previous family reunion cruising experiences so came in with the following thoughts (read about that in my last entry)
1- We weren’t actually going anywhere: We’ll dock at tourist traps and they will only give you a maximum of eight hours there so that you can’t wander off.
2- Food, food everywhere, but I still feel like I’m starving: There is 24 hours of free food access. But, because I have become an enormous food snob and Food Coop nerd I can taste the canned, powdered and pre-cooked nature of all of mass-made food. I’m going to resort to my stowaway nuts.
3-The cruise will make an attempt to make you think that a floating Hilton with attached mall (aka the ship) is an authentic and exotic experience: For example, by hiring Chinese folks to serve the Chinese food, Indians for the Indian food….
It was not until mid-week that I was able to move past these expectations. For good reason as I was on the cruise to film a pilot (aptly named “The Lez Boat”) so spent the majority of my time learning lines or cooped up in odd locations acting as “Heather” the “Fitness Instructor.” I also was scared when my friend Katherine told me that she saw a girl with a hat that said “I took my girlfriend bow hunting.”
As I got more time away from set and into the midst of things my impressions of the cruising experience started to change. Yes, the food is blah, and yes, everyone is funneled into tourist traps, but when I accepted those things as givens (and gave my stomach a chance to get used to preservatives) I saw the positives of what was going on around me. Specifically that 1,000 lesbians were on board having a week-long party and the MTV spring break that no one gave them. People were friendly, relaxed and happy because how could you not be? Everyone was invested in having a good time and enjoying the surrounding community. Here are the positives of being on a Sweet Cruise — wet T-shirt contests, go-go dancers by the pool, Toyland workshops, queer bingo, gay country dancing, parties late into the night every night…Lesson learned: you could be in Antarctica, the Republican National Convention, or a pre-fab tourist trap, if you insulate yourself from harsh conditions with enough good people you are bound to have a good time.
This blog is about what amuses (and annoys) me, how I keep myself motivated and random things I learn from amazing people.
Who is this character? Lauren LoGiudice - actor, model, performance artist, writer, host, producer, improv comedian and amateur chef. A NYer – born in Queens, now living out in Brooklyn – who likes to shake the dust of the outer boroughs off to travel the world, living and working in places that range from India to Mexico to Italy. Eats her greens and hates bacon.
Mob rule wins every time. The population is so huge that even if you get a small percentage to agree with you that’s a damn lot of people.
