A birthday calls for we-time with family and close friends, lots of cake and a chat with The Telegraph! “I want to make the happiest of memories,” smiles Rukmini, when we ask her about her birthday wish. Over to Rukmini Maitra, who turns a year younger today.
Do birthdays still excite you?
Of course, I start the countdown in December! On January 1, my friends and I open the calendar and we mark the date! It excites me like a kid in a candy store. Also, I celebrate my mom on my birthday. There is a certain sense of responsibility with each birthday. I want to live up to everyone’s expectations.
What are your birthday plans?
I’ll be celebrating it with my friends and family. This time I also wish to celebrate it with my fans. I may turn it into a Boomerang birthday!
How important are birthday gifts?
Gifts are always more than welcome! It is the time of the year when I truly get to be with my friends and family and spend genuine quality time. Togetherness is what matters to me the most. Time is the biggest present. My friends are asking, ‘What do you want?’ But I don’t have an answer. I am just so excited to be with them... to celebrate the moment with them. And, of course, lots of cake. That’s the most exciting part.
When it comes to the Bengali film industry, do you still feel that you are an outsider?
I’m an outsider but I have been welcomed... I don’t know whether I have been accepted yet. I would like to believe that I have been loved. As long as I am loved, I am happy. I don’t know whether my industry peers think I am an insider or an outsider... I don’t know about that acceptance. But they do love me.
How important is validation from the film industry peers?
Validation is gratifying. It feels great when one is appreciated. It feels amazing when Dev, Jeet, Shiboprosad Mukherjee, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, Kaushik Ganguly, Anik Datta and Sudipta Chakraborty praise your work. With Nisha (in Boomerang), it has opened up a brand new vision for a heroine. It was a moment of pride for everyone. This is not how they had imagined to see a mainstream heroine in a film. I feel Nisha has cast a spell on everybody (smiles). Everyone from Jeet Sir to director Sauvik Kundu has worked towards Nisha as well... to cast her, to give life to her, to position her. It is teamwork. That’s why there is so much noise around Nisha. This is also my first character that so many children have loved. It is like Disney for children. This time I have been loved by all age groups!
What did your niece Amaira have to say about your performance?
She is the only person who did not ask me how I crawled on the ground as Nisha. She is the only person who did it better than me and showed me! She was very happy. She was talking and laughing like Nisha the whole day and the next morning. She is busy turning off everyone pretending everyone is a robot in the family!
Once you started shooting for Chaamp, did you have any idea that you would go on to complete seven years in the film industry?
I didn’t think that I would survive through the second day of my first film. When I said ‘yes’ to Chaamp a lot of people had called me from Bombay for films. But I said ‘no’ to them. While I was dubbing for Chaamp, Cockpit came my way and I fell in love with it. By the time I was done with Chaamp something was very scintillating about it. Something was very tempting about it. Subconciously I must have felt that there was something very enticing about the process. I wanted to learn more about it. I became a student of acting. I was trying to learn from my experiences every day. It piqued my curiosity. Modelling will always be my first love. But I think the greatest love stories are born out of chance, which is acting for me. I have found the one.
How would you sum up these seven years?
The life that I have seen in these seven years is equal to seeing the seven wonders of the world. It is a difficult life but what good is a life without its ups and downs.
From the outside, people might feel it is a very glamorous life that stars lead....
Nobody actually gets to see what goes on behind the scenes. And, it is not for them to know.
Going forward, do you see yourself taking up a more proactive role in matters of the industry, getting into production or mentoring people?
I would love to have my own production house. I do enjoy production and administration. It really excites me. Hopefully, in the near future, I would love to do something along those lines. Also, there are a lot of issues I see technicians facing in the industry. I am not mighty enough to do anything about it now. But I hope I’ll be able to contribute and help in some way. I would like to make some amendments for the betterment of the technicians... they are the backbone of the industry. They deserve so much more than what they have.
Also, a lot of aspiring models have told me to have a grooming centre. A lot of my friends have also told me this... they know that I like to take up projects. This is something that I have always wanted to do ever since I succeded as a model and I knew that I could make some impact. I would love to do something for the modelling fraternity... bring them under one umbrella and a proactive system; making it more organised.
What is your birthday wish?
I wish to take up more roles that challenge me. I would like to accomplish a lot more as a performer. I would love to work with a lot of directors since it opens up new perspectives. I would like to do memorable work.
What’s the one thing that you would like to change about yourself?
I am perfect! You adjust (smiles).
Do you feel cinema or the acting process has changed you as a person?
It has enriched me as a human being. It has taught me how to process a lot of emotions which I don’t generally do. I don’t tend to visit my traumas. Acting has made me visit a lot of traumas which I did not know I had in my system. Possibly, I was escaping it in a way hence I never visited them, and I did not even recall them. I don’t remember half of them. But acting is such a beautiful yet bizarre medium that it takes you back into some memory lane that you did not know existed within your system. And it taps into an emotion which causes such an outburst that you realise you need to know how to contain it. I am an extremely emotional person... to know how to control and contain my emotions is something I did not know and that too is an art.
Through acting you have learned to contain and control your emotions?
Yes. And also feel them at the same time... and not suppress them.
So it almost acts as therapy?
You know you have this huge powerball of energy in your system... you don’t throw it all out at once. You know how to use it as a machine gun. You know when to shoot a bullet and how. If you are an actor, you know what I am talking about.
I was a judge at a dance reality show. There was a certain performance which was about a boy who gets lost on a railway track and a doctor finds him and brings him back home. While I was watching that as a judge on the show I was shaking and my body started trembling. I started crying. I did not know why I was doing that. Later I remembered that I got lost on a railway track for two hours when I was four years old. I actually happened to find a family doctor when I was looking for help... he brought me back home. After so many years, I processed the trauma on that day and got closure.
Rukmini’s yellow outfit: Vizyon
Pantsuit: Reik
Styled by: Neha Gandhi Binjrajka
Make-up: Bithika Benia
Hair: Mousami Chhetri
Cover and inside pictures: Surja Mondal