Mita Vashisht Instagram – PORTFOLIO WALE DIN
Photo, courtesy Rakesh Khatri.
My friend Rakesh Khatri was an amateur photographer. I had just graduated from the National School Of Drama.
While moving to Bombay, and to films was not on my immediate agenda…I did neet a ‘portfolio’ as it was referred to those days.
‘Photos ka portfolio hai?’ the director will ask you, I was told. (Those days there were no casting agencies or casting directors, you met the director who would be directing the film or the tv serial).
“Khatri, portfolio chahiye yaar” I wailed dramatically over the land line phone.
“No problem, kal” (tomorrow) and Khatri disconnected the call.
Khatri was a guy of few, VERY few words. I think it was that paan- masala he so loved chewing which restricted his speech to a few sounds or at best to a huge grin—it was a vocabulary that I had to learn to decipher, and managed to, in the course of the many photo shoots we did…
Prep for the shoot was something like this:
Rummage through my younger brother’s cupboard for a denim shirt,
One Lakme lip gloss which was past the expiry date (I didn’t check, actually, but I know I had bought I four years prior and used it sparingly, so in hindsight it must have expired).
Ready????
ready!!!
Thereafter to stand on the terrace of my house where ever Khatri gestured ( where the light was falling the best)….
Khatri loaded the film in his camera and did about ten or eleven clicks per ‘costume change’ till we finished the roll of 36 frames.
A few days later we would pore over the contact sheet and choose which ones to make large- sized copies of.
These photos that Khatri had clicked circulated for the next two years, as my ‘portfolio’ and sometime later, one of them found its way to an half page article in the Times of India, by the hugely celebrated (and almost iconic) film journalist Khalid Mohammed.
Khalid’s article featured Shabana Azmi and Me and Dimple Kapadia. My photo clicked by Rakesh Khatri sat in the centre flanked by the photos of the two veteran stars…
Thanks Khatriiii…!!!!
# | Posted on 07/Jul/2023 15:56:30
