A celebrity overnight, he is a darling to kids and adults

The year 2009. After 20 years in Dubai I am back in Mumbai. My friend Meher Marfatia is working on a book called Laughter In The House covering the last forty years of Parsee Theatre. The casting director of the new Vodafone commercial sees my photograph in the book and calls up my daughter Shernaz whom she knew well since she was also the casting director for Black and Guzaarish which starred Shernaz.

Shernaz phones me: “Dad, you have an offer for acting in a TV commercial for Vodafone.” I was a stage actor before I left for Dubai but had never ever done a TV commercial.

However, as always, I love to take on new challenges and I readily agreed. I was one of the shortlisted actors for the role. The TV crew arrived at home along with the casting director who briefly explained to me my character in the commercial and took a few photographs. These were forwarded along with other prospective candidates to the director Prakash Verma of Nirvana Films who had shot the two earlier iconic Vodafone commercials: the one with the adorable Pug and Zoozoos series.

I was selected and within days flew off accompanied by my wife to Colombo, Srilanka, where the commercial was going to be shot. There were in all three commercials. The first shows an old man who produces gifts — an apple and later an ink pen — for his teenage friend. The second shows the old man impatiently waiting for his friend to show up for a game of carrom, and the final one where the old man painstakingly makes a propeller as a birthday gift for the boy.

Verma gave me the brief that I am a cantankerous old man who befriends a teenager and gradually becomes fond of him. He had added, “It’s my job to make the audiences fall in love with you.”

And how his words came true! In all, it was three days of film shoot and two days of photo shoot for hoardings. I was back in Mumbai anxiously awaiting the commercial to hit TV screens.

And then it happened. Overnight I became a celebrity, a household name: the Vodafone Man. I couldn’t believe it. In my over forty years as theatre actor I had never experienced this. My son, who was flooded with calls from his friends, said: “Dad, the power of TV.” My phone kept on ringing as calls came even from Dubai. Be it on the streets, in restaurants, in my club, wherever I went, I was ‘the Vodafone Man’.

The man on the street smiling and nodding his head as I walked by, some wanting to shake hands, a few wanting an autograph, some even wanting me to pose with them for a photograph taken with the mobile phone camera. Ordinary people who would never get a chance to click a picture with the likes of Shah Rukh Khan getting some consolation from a pix with a poor TV commercial star!

I get special attention be it at my grocer’s, my chemist’s, at restaurants where even the waiters nod in appreciation; even at my bank. For school kids and teenagers, I was their ‘Vodafone Uncle’. My seven-year-old grand daughter looking at a hoarding shouted to her mother: “Mummy, look, Grandpa. So big he looks. He must be very rich!’ It’s been nearly a year since the commercial was released but the adulation goes on.

I’d like to end this episode with a saying I had read some time back: “The Beauty of Life does not depend on how happy you are but how happy others are because of you.” Who says life can’t begin at 80?

The author is well-known stage personality