Nakul Bhalla

I was born some months after Top Gun came out. This is relevant because my rather daredevil-ish youth - cycling, swimming, climbing, often falling, and the scars on my elbows and knees suggest that this was the most seminal event that influenced my being. But I can only surmise in hindsight. The nomadic childhood of an Air Force brat meant that I was added to the list of my closest friends, and we often spent time taking things apart at home, occasionally even successfully putting them back together. It also meant developing punning as a tension diffuser when facing exasperated parents. I therefore concluded expertly that I was predisposed to being an engineer, so I went and became a Mechanical one, thereby corroborating a posthumously grateful Charles Darwin.

While I was always an avid reader, uni allowed me to also explore my creative and literary side on steroids, um, figuratively. I started making ambigrams, solving cryptic crosswords, making word puzzles, learning HAM radio, you name it. While there was no dearth of intellectual stimulation, my problem solving cravings needed a physical arm too. And though immersing myself in sports was always an option, what courted me a tad bit earlier was theatre. Darwin, once again, albeit posthumously, sighed in relief.

Soon, I was acting, directing large-scale productions, getting sponsors, recruiting people, becoming aware that I was tapping into and nurturing a creative leadership side of me that I hadn't known earlier. I could also now inflict my puns upon the actors I was working with. What more could a 19-year old possibly want!

Post-graduation, I balanced a career as an R&D engineer with evening theatre for a few years, before plunging into full-time acting. While the CV section has details of this phase of mine, I'll keep the meatier anecdotes for my blog.

So, long story short, I've now been a part of some amazing productions. Notable roles include:

• Lord Shiva/Narrator in Shikhandi by: Faezeh Jalali

• Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen, dir: Prakash Belawadi

• Thomas Novachek in Venus in Fur, dir: Arjun Sajnani

• Randle Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, dir: Arundhati Raja

I've found some wonderful mentors, colleagues and friends in Anmol Vellani, Veenapani Chawla, Prakash Belawadi, Ashok Mandanna, Tim Supple, Sharanya Ramprakash, Vinay Kumar and Nimmy Raphel. I've now read a bunch of Shakespeare's works without Sparknotes...yeah, lowkey-flex.

And I've discovered that I now actually even have one of these - an: