Hey Mazda, send me a recent picture of yours,” I received a message in the middle of the night around this time last year. It was from Sooni Taraporevala, a dear friend and one of India’s finest photographers and filmmakers. It was the middle of my night because I was in Australia to deliver a guest lecture at their annual neurosurgical conference. I instantly obliged the next morning. “You look too young,” she rejected me. I asked for some context. “I’m looking for someone to play dad to two teenage girls in my new web series, Waack Girls,” she said, without divulging much. “You’ve kept bugging me all these years saying you always wanted to act, and bragging that you were a dramatics champ in school, so I thought I could offer you a 10-second role. But you don’t fit the part,” the perfectionist in her conceded. 

I wasn’t ready to give up an opportunity of a lifetime, so I sent her pictures of me with a salt-and-pepper stubble from six months ago, when I wasn’t able to shave as we had gone trekking to the Everest base camp. For once in my life, I was happy it was more salt and less pepper. “Not bad,” she said with a slight hint of approval. “Don’t shave for the next two weeks,” she ordered, as she sent me the four-line script I had to audition for. The premise of the scene was that I was driving a car with my wife by my side and my kids bickering with each other in the backseat (Not very different from a regular real-life scenario for me). However, in the script, I’m an ad guru on a call jubilantly talking to my ad agency team while constantly distracted by my kids fighting. Then something happens…