My TV Debut

The last time I posted was a few weeks back, I know, and I'm sorry, but internet service has been terrible around these parts. I've gotten to know the customer service lady, whose name I think is "Shweater", at Spearhead Communications quite well.

But around that time, a few weeks ago, I had just gotten back from 10 days working down south in Madurai. I hadn't shaved since the Rickshaw Run and I (still) haven't cut my hair since about August, and when I walked into the office, Won Pai, this Bengali guy who works in the adjoining office, and I were introduced, and he had to be convinced, repeatedly that I was American, and not Israeli. Indeed, with Mags and Dad in Pushkar, we got greeted on the street with the occasional "boker tov". I was getting used to being thought of as an Israeli. I even wear a hippie head band sometimes to encourage people.

So imagine my continued surprise when my friend Chris called me last week and told me that he had a friend who was looking for "typically Australian-looking" people to star in a TV commercial, and that I fit the bill. The gig paid Rs. 5,000 (about $120) for a day's work, and it was a bank holiday, so I took the train over to a sports club in Chembur and signed in with the producer at the set.

They dressed me up like an Australian cricket fan:



There was a hair-dresser and everything. She was called the "hair-walla," much like the "tea-walla" or the "daba-walla," which I thought was cute. She's putting pigtails on this russian chick who told me she was a model, but I didn't believe her, because she was covered in atrocious tattoos.



This is our setting: a cricket stadium during the cricket World Cup, which begins sometime soon in the "West Indies," which is actually also one of the participating competitor countries. We all cheer wildly, then yell, "Match On, Tho Videocon!", which means, "Match On!, so Videocon!", which refers to a TV manufacturer called Videocon, on whose TV's you should watch the Cricket World Cup, I say.

That's me in the cricket helmet in the middle.



Some more lairy fans... The guy on the left is an Indian-born, Australian-bred Hare Krishna who speaks Hindi, so he's a full-time b-list Bollywood actor. The other guy is a Brit who has been living in Colombia for 20 years writing books about South American politics. You meet really awesome people at commercial shoots.



The coolest thing about the shoot was how the director, cameraman, and crew filmed us through this really strange hole in a curtain, so while they were making a film that people would watch of us, on a small square in an electronic box, it sort of looked like they were the ones in a box, being observed by us. Hard to explain what I mean, but here's what it looked like, with our producer, "G", in the green shirt in the front.



Here's just the hole...



So that's it. I'm gonna be seen by 400 million people in India during the Cricket World Cup, pretending I'm an Australian cricket fan.

Match on tho Videocon!