Word: schooled
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...1970s, the socially conscious new wave of the 1960s - so-called parallel cinema - began to enter the mainstream, bringing Indians' everyday experiences to the big screen. Khan was transfixed. He had been an indifferent student at college in Jaipur, but now pursued a spot in the National School of Drama in New Delhi with single-minded devotion. "My father died the same year, and I was the eldest," he recalls. "Morally and socially, it was difficult to leave." Withstanding family pressure, Khan reasoned with himself that he would end up demoralized, bitter and unable to support them if he stayed...
...Drama school was a new world, but not what he expected. "I thought somebody, somehow, would give me the secret to acting," he recalls. Indian theater then had nothing like the studios of method-acting guru Lee Strasberg or Stanislavski disciple Stella Adler to give actors tools and techniques. It had its roots in drawing-room melodramas and classical literature, including an ancient text, the Natyashastra, devoted to the theory of drama. "It even tells you where in the audience a critic should sit," Khan says. "But you cannot learn acting from that." So he immersed himself in the films...
...final year, a young director casting her first feature - a cinema verité take on slum life in Bombay - came to the school scouting for talent. "One of the things I'm slightly proud of is kind of discovering Irrfan," says Mira Nair, who cast Khan as a letter writer in Salaam Bombay! His role was edited down to a fleeting appearance, but Nair says that even then, Khan was different. "I was very, very struck by his being in the part rather than acting," she recalls. "He wasn't striving. His striving was invisible...
...best refuge for serious actors at the time, and Khan appeared in a good number, including Banegi Apni Baat - a drama that served as an incubator for several big names - and Kahkashan, in which he played the Marxist Urdu poet Makhdoom Mohiuddin. He also married his girlfriend from drama school, a scriptwriter. They had two children, now 6 and 11, and he focused on his craft. Not that such craft was especially valued in a business where there was no freedom for actors to interpret the roles, and where directors dictated every phrase and gesture. "That used to suffocate...
Soon the wider world is coming to call. Mapplethorpe is taken up by the older men who will school him in art history and seat him at tables with Bianca Jagger. Smith starts giving poetry readings that lead to a record contract. For these kids, it's childhood's end. The Rimbaud-Watusi years are just beginning. But the chocolate milk has run out for good...