Actor Parichay Sharma - Resilience and the Relentless Waiting
Writing about resilient people has been my thing for some time now. Perhaps because resilience is one of those qualities we don't really think about until life asks us to find it. We all have moments when getting back on track seems easy enough, and then there are moments when getting back up and trying again takes considerably more effort.
But resilience isn't always about getting back up after a fall. Sometimes it is about staying where you are, holding on to what you believe in and continuing to wait for the next opportunity to come along. Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than in the life of an actor, where the waiting can be as much a part of the career as the actual work.
My protagonist today is an actor. Parichay Sharma has had to draw on resilience repeatedly through his career. His journey has taken him through the excitement of new opportunities, the disappointment of rejection, the uncertainty of not knowing when the next job will come and, over time, towards a greater acceptance of the unpredictable nature of the profession.
At 24, Parichay walked away from a stable career in Human Resources in Delhi and moved to Mumbai with a dream that came with no guarantees. He had already spent two years doing theatre in Delhi and had always wanted to become an actor. But wanting to act and making a living from acting were two very different things.
He chose the uncertainty anyway.
What followed was not an easy beginning. Mumbai's doors did not open simply because he had arrived with a dream. He had to knock on them, again and again, and often find them firmly shut.
Some of his earliest auditions, and many that followed, took place at Aaram Nagar. Standing in line for an audition could often turn out to be an exercise in futility. There were plenty of rejections before he finally got his first television role in Zee TV's Aur Pyaar Ho Gaya in 2013, where he played a young boy in the family.
And then the work started to come in...
Sadda Haq, Balika Vadhu, Begusarai, Khwaabon Ki Zamin Par and Vasudha are among the television shows he has worked in. He went on to work in films, including Ram Gopal Varma's D Company, and in web series such as Dhahanam. He has also appeared in advertising campaigns for brands including Dr. Vaidya's and Wonderchef.
On paper, it sounds like a career taking shape. In reality, an actor's journey is rarely quite so linear.
Parichay describes his career as a roller coaster ride, with its highs, its lows and its plateaus. His work has taken him beyond Mumbai too, to Tamil Nadu, Bengaluru and Goa, although much of his television work was shot in Film City.
His roles so far have ranged from innocent young men to more greyish personas, but it is the powerful and complex characters that truly draw him. His first film, D Company, gave him the opportunity to play a gangster, and he would love to explore more characters with that kind of intensity. Politicians, gangsters and policemen all interest him, not simply because they are powerful characters, but because they offer an actor so much to inhabit.
Parichay feels that a character has to be lived in its entirety. The mannerisms, the silences, the vulnerabilities, the aggression, the contradictions and all the things that may never be explicitly spoken have to become part of the actor. For him, the real challenge and joy of acting lies in giving everything he has to that transformation.
It is this complete surrender to a character, he feels, that can take a performance beyond simply being convincing and make it unforgettable. He wants to find characters that demand that kind of commitment from him, characters in which he can disappear sufficiently to allow the person he is portraying to come alive.
But perhaps the most revealing part of our conversation is what he says about the difference between the young man who arrived in Mumbai at 24 and the man he is today.
At 24, he wanted to explore, party, meet new people and experience life. A few years later, responsibilities began to pile up and he found himself wondering why he was still so far from where he thought he would be by then.
Now, at 36, his outlook is different.
There is a certain peace in the way he speaks about where he is today. He has come to believe that what is meant for you will eventually reach you. There is less of the anxiety about having to make everything happen immediately and more acceptance of the fact that a career, like life, doesn't always move according to the timetable you have imagined for yourself.
Perhaps that is another form of resilience.
For an actor, the hardest part of the job, Parichay says, is finding the job in the first place.
Once you have a schedule lined up, you can actually enjoy the work. The days may be long, but there is a camera, a role, a set and a reason to be there. The uncertainty comes when there is no schedule waiting.
There are dark days and there are greyish days, he says. The important thing is not to live in fear, because insecurity is always around the corner. An actor does what is needed to bring in the money.
There is a strange contradiction in that statement. Someone can love acting deeply and still have to constantly think about how to sustain a life between jobs. Passion doesn't pay every bill, and talent doesn't guarantee the next call.
And yet, when the work comes, Parichay seems to embrace it completely.
A typical working day begins at 7 in the morning. He reaches the set by 9 and may work until 9 at night, returning home exhausted but, as he describes it, super happy and satisfied.
He doesn't seem to resent the long hours because, for him, this is work he has chosen out of passion but at the same time he also believes that commitment should not mean giving up all boundaries.
He finds it difficult to understand why someone working in an office should routinely be expected to stay late into the evening. In his view, that should not be allowed. There is something quite revealing in that distinction. He can give everything to work he is passionate about, while still believing that a person's time and life outside work deserve to be respected.
A non-working day is a very different affair. He may wake up around 10, go to the gym, socialise occasionally and sometimes simply sit around with nothing particular to do.
That last part, I suspect, may be one of the less glamorous realities of being an actor.
He would, of course, like to be working much more.
And I wish that for him too.
Because there is something about the life of an actor that demands a particular kind of courage. You put yourself out there repeatedly. You audition. You wait. You get rejected. You get another opportunity. You work for long hours. You disappear from view for a while. You start again.
You cannot afford to believe that one rejection defines you, or that one successful role means you have finally arrived.
Parichay's ambitions don't end with acting either. Someday, he would like to write more and perhaps direct.
So the journey continues.
Maybe that is what resilience really looks like. Not some grand, heroic quality that appears when everything falls apart, but the quieter ability to keep showing up when there is no guarantee of what comes next.
For someone who chose acting at 24 and is still chasing the possibilities at 36, the willingness to keep showing up may be the most important role of all.
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