Priyatam Mudivarti

Mira Nair was vis­it­ing North­east­ern Uni­ver­sity in Boston on Thurs­day and my cousin was push­ing me to take our script — “Yuti” to her, he’s been my biggest inspi­ra­tion behind this script from day one. At first, I thought it was ridicu­lous. She is now a big star and is hands full with offers from top hol­ly­wood projects. And I’m still in the process of pub­lish­ing my first short story. Too early, I thought.

The ‘con­fer­ence’ was more like an inter­view ses­sion with a panel of jour­nal­ists. She spoke a lot. A lot, about her life. There’s a great respect I have for her, know­ing her life, her strug­gle and why she made movies which were straight from her heart and expe­ri­ences. You don’t get to learn more bout people’s lives apart from the films they make. For some­one who is on the realms of being a big hol­ly­wood star, she is so hum­ble, wears Indian dresses still, believes in Indian iden­tity and does not fake an Amer­i­can accent. Very impressed. And here is the good part — We did end up meet­ing her for 1 minute (thanks to my won­der­ful cousin) and briefly spoke about our story. She said, she doesn’t usu­ally ‘accept’ script ideas but will try to read it. I had 20 pages of the story writ­ten with a ter­iffic pro­logue. She kept it in her purse and said come on in (small tea-party and auto­graph ses­sion with NEU’s cul­tural group).

I don’t know where it goes from here, maybe the dust­bin or maybe it’s just one of those “Ouch, it hap­pened to me” moments. But I’m deter­mined to sell this script some­day, somewhere.

I will.