“I call myself a born and brought up introvert, because I don’t know when I actually became one. So I assume I am made that way.
In the world of dominants and extroverts, introverts always tend to stay away from social life but we have dreams that are against our personality.
After my college, I got an opportunity to direct theatre plays. In the next two years I directed many short plays. I was doing good at that. I wished to act in a play at least once to be on the stage. But I was holding myself back because I was very conscious of being in front of people.
One day one of the co-directors asked me if I can act in his play. I had to say no initially but then with a little coaxing I agreed. It was for a competition called short and sweet, India’s biggest short play competition and it was happening in Chennai.
Since it was going to be my first experience, I wanted to rehearse a lot and make myself confident.
But my director karthik was working for an IT company and did not have time for rehearsal.
The other actors were experienced and that added on a sense of nervousness as well
With just one day before leaving Chennai we met and he told he had made small changes to the script and that small change made my character from a small role to a main character. I started worry a lot as on that day we just had time to memorize lines but no time to rehearse.
We reached Chennai the very next day. Before the show, we did a slight tech rehearsal. The light man straight off told us that I wouldn’t be fit for the role. But the director still believed in me and asked me to just go there on stage and perform. All I knew was that I went up on stage and gave my best! The director looked surprised when he came to me and just uttered that the performance was just so bad. Since then we started to practice really well.
Each play would be performed twice, once on Saturday and once on Sunday. On Saturday night myself and my director were talking on what went wrong. I told him that I got little nervous and I was little scared which pushed me to nervousness.
Then he made me realize something. In theatre there is no mike, no camera. So the actor has to be very loud and exaggerate the emotions to be audible and visible by everyone in the auditorium, you need lot of energy to do that. So first important thing for a stage actor is energy. As nervousness is a form of energy, for somebody who is calm have to generate lot of energy, but somebody who is nervous have to just convert the existing energy in to different forms like happiness and excitement. As newtons law says energy cannot be created nor destroyed but can be transformed form one form to another.
If he would have told anything else, I don’t know if it would have helped me but knowing that what I thought as negative is the biggest positive it really helped me. Backed by newtons law. First time in my career I am using something that I studied.
The next day, I performed really well. Our play got best play award and my co-actor got best actor award for the day.
After the show, some of audiences and judge, they appreciated me but then I was waiting for that one person, I was glancing at him very often. The light man – he understood what I was expecting and came down and told me that he completely saw a different person today and I have been a great actor today.
It’s beautiful that what is looked as a negative form outside is really something positive.
So that’s when I discovered being an introvert is infact a blessing which I can use to my advantage.
There on I ended up acting in many plays. Right now I’m encouraging everybody who tells me that they are an introvert, to speak more and express themselves more.”

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