An artiste has to struggle alone, says Naseeruddin Shah

Karachi
You must get it once and for all that as an artiste you have to struggle all alone. Nobody is going to help you. An honest, determined struggle will help you achieve the fruits of hard work and you will find yourself in the annals of well-known artistes.
These pearls of wisdom were imparted by Indian matinee idol Naseeruddin Shah while delivering a lecture to would-be theatre artistes and theatre buffs at the Arts Council Karachi on Tuesday.
The programme was arranged by the Arts Council for schoolchildren both from the posh areas and the working class quarters of the city.
They were highly excited at being addressed by a legendary celebrity and Shah’s speech was punctuated with hearty applause by the gathering, often a bit too loud with all the shrieks and whistles.
There were 1600-plus children all those who had registered for the theatre workshop of the youth festival scheduled for March 1.
Shah dispelled the notion that acting was just a form of entertainment. “It is a really profound way of communication between two individuals or groups”,” he said.
He narrated a very interesting case about himself. “I was travelling from Delhi to Dehra Dun and true to the Subcontinent’s tradition where people just can’t sit quiet, somebody began asking me all sorts of the most personal questions as to who I was , how many children did I have, what I was doing, where was I heading. When I told him that I was studying drama, he was baffled and asked as to what was that all about. ‘Why does one have to study for drama?’ the passenger asked me.”
Shah told the audience that he was often asked as to what one had to study for a drama till one day he decided that in reply to this question, he would just reply that he was working for a Bachelor’s degree in English literature.
Tracing the history of acting, he said the first known theatre started as a means of communication, not entertainment. Later, he added, acting became confined to temples and places of worship in countries like Greece, other Mediterranean countries and the Indo-Pak Subcontinent.
“Don’t see what you have on the stage but count the number of sweat beads that you’ve dropped on it,” he advised future theatre stars.
“Om Puri and I wanted to do theatre in Bombay and discovered that we had to do it all alone. If you take theatre to be just a means to something else, just forget it.”