DH Radio | The Lead: My career could've been better but no regrets, says actor Gulshan Devaiah

In this episode of The Lead from DH Radio, actor Gulshan Devaiah of Dum Maaro Dum and Shaitan fame talks about how his career in Bollywood and theatre began. He gives us a low down of what it is like to get into acting as an "outsider" to the industry and the difficulties he faced trying to pursue his passion.

Excerpts:

Anupama Ramakrishnan: How have you been dealing with the lockdown? What have you been up to?

Gulshan Devaiah: I’ve been quite ok actually. I was in Rajasthan. I was shooting for a project. We had to close that and come back to Mumbai and the lockdown started. I guess everybody was in the same position. We didn’t know what to expect. I think I’ve been coping well despite 2020 turning out to be one of the worst years in everybody’s lives.

I think this lockdown situation has added more misery. In fact, on the contrary, I think I looked at it as a time to introspect and take time and reassess things and all that. I think I had a bit of an advantage also, to begin with. I am an only child, I’m used to spending a lot of time by myself from childhood.

Because many times I would come back from schools and my parents would still be at work. Yeah, a lot of times in the holidays I would end up spending a lot of days with myself. So, I was pretty used to that. It was not an unfamiliar feeling that you know, oh I need people to sort of pass my time or I need to watch something online or a movie so, I feel very comfortable with spending time by myself.

But of course, there are odd days when it is difficult, it is boring and you want to like you know you want to do something that you like, you want to be working, you want to be going out and enjoying the weather and life. That’s not possible but overall I think I’ve been doing pretty ok actually.

Anupama: Gulshan, coming to your movies, your movies have been critically acclaimed, be it Shaitan, Hunter, would you say you are in happy space professionally?

Gulshan: My career could’ve been definitely better. One can always say, I would definitely say that it could’ve been better but I don’t have any regrets. I also came here not knowing many things, I didn’t know how things work.

To know more about the conversation, tune in to the podcast.