The Surgical Waack

Representation pic

Hey Mazda, send me a recent picture of yours," I received a message in the middle of the night around this time last year. It was from Sooni Taraporevala, a dear friend and one of India's finest photographers and filmmakers. It was the middle of my night because I was in Australia to deliver a guest lecture at their annual neurosurgical conference. I instantly obliged the next morning. "You look too young," she rejected me. I asked for some context. "I'm looking for someone to play dad to two teenage girls in my new web series, Waack Girls," she said, without divulging much. "You've kept bugging me all these years saying you always wanted to act, and bragging that you were a dramatics champ in school, so I thought I could offer you a 10-second role. But you don't fit the part," the perfectionist in her conceded.

I wasn't ready to give up an opportunity of a lifetime, so I sent her pictures of me with a salt-and-pepper stubble from six months ago, when I wasn't able to shave as we had gone trekking to the Everest base camp. For once in my life, I was happy it was more salt and less pepper. "Not bad," she said with a slight hint of approval. "Don't shave for the next two weeks," she ordered, as she sent me the four-line script I had to audition for. The premise of the scene was that I was driving a car with my wife by my side and my kids bickering with each other in the backseat (Not very different from a regular real-life scenario for me). However, in the script, I'm an ad guru on a call jubilantly talking to my ad agency team while constantly distracted by my kids fighting. Then something happens…

In view of my intense dedication to my craft, I delivered my oration at the conference unshaven and unkempt - I was already in character. I made an audition video in a golf buggy at the resort I was staying at and sent it across. To my surprise, I was selected. "What the hell is ‘waack', though?" I asked, intrigued. "It's a form of street dance that originated across the US in the 1970s disco era. This dance form is known for its distinctive arm movements, which are fast, sharp, and expressive, often resembling the motions of swinging, flinging, and whipping through the air, hence the name ‘waacking'. It's a story about six girls from Kolkata who form a dance group and the adventures they have," I was told. I was playing the lead girl's father - for about 10 seconds.

The date and time of the shoot were informed to me by the team coordinating with me, who treated me like a professional actor. My measurements were taken in advance and evolving pictures of my appearance were asked for. They checked what pants I would be wearing even though they were not going to be seen while I was driving. I showed up at 6 am somewhere beyond the brown outskirts of dusty Mumbai, where a broad road had been cordoned off to shoot the scene. Vanity vans, food enclosures, and production tents occupied their respective positions. Mannequins that looked like the four of us were dressed in matching clothes to shoot some dummy scene. I had my own vanity van with my name on it. I now understood what real stars felt like. We sat in it and rehearsed our lines. My hair was greyed a little further with puffs of powder. The time on my watch was set to the time of the scene. "This much prep toh we don't even do for surgery!" I joked with the team, "And we have only one take," I added. "For us cinema is as important as life," one of the production guys told me as they adjusted my collar.

They mounted the car on a roller, with a ginormous camera attached to my window and the director of photography Igor Kropotov sitting behind it, looking like he was suspended mid-air. The windows were rolled down and, in the sweltering heat of the October sun, our director gently said: "Action!" The car started rolling and we said our lines. The four of us were supposed to be talking simultaneously in the car, so we had to capture what each one was saying. "Let's do it one more time," Sooni said with uncommon lucidity, clearly not impressed with my delivery. She kept going, "And one more time," with gentle suggestions on how to make it better each time. We did it together and then individually. All the others were seasoned actors; I was the one who made them take 15 rounds of the track, finally accepting the outcome. There were so many nuances they needed to capture from different angles, it was mesmerising. "Do you tell actors upfront that they are horrible?" I asked her to give me an honest answer. "Don't worry, you were fine," she said, appeasing my trepidation.

As dusk fell, and bats hung upside down in the trees, the light was right to shoot some flashback moments of the family spending quality time together. We changed a few costumes and pranced around a little, reminiscent of young families having fun, until the director finally said, "And it's a wrap!" I found out only later that it was the last day of shooting for the entire series.

I was amazed and aghast at the technical difficulty, attention to detail, synchronisation of teams, and all the hard work in the heat to spend over 10 hours shooting what eventually became only 10 seconds in the film. It was akin to spending six years in medical school and then six years in neurosurgical training to be able to meticulously perform a six-hour operation.

A couple of months ago, Sooni had toyed with the idea of making a medical web series, and I had invited her over to come and see me in surgery, which she took stunning pictures of. It was one of the most enlightening days of her life, she said, to be able to look into someone's head opened up. And this was just as exhilarating for me, to have my day of grunge and grime, which on screen would transform into glitz and glamour.

Waack Girls, a passionate celebration of life and its struggle, is out on Amazon Prime on November 22 in India and worldwide in 240 countries and territories. I hope you'll watch our labour of love and my debut on screen.

See you Soon-i!

The writer is practising neurosurgeon at Wockhardt Hospitals and Honorary Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at Grant Medical College and Sir JJ Group of Hospitals mazda.turel@mid-day.com