Vijay Tendulkar had some sharp observations about life in Mumbai, which included the underbelly of the film industry, that is the murky world of strugglers and unpaid assistants.

The strugglers who fail to get a role often end up as assistants, who do everything from fetching and carrying for the star, to taking the rap for the misdemeanour of others, and giving the director company in his drinking sessions.

Rakesh Bedi has been performing a one-man show Massage, based on Tendulkar’s writings for fifteen years now, and plans to go on for another fifteen. The play, directed by Harbansh Singh, is about a young man who comes to Mumbai from a North Indian town, to become an actor, because everyone at home tells him he looks like a hero. He does not have to struggle like many others, since he has the gift of the gab, and is hired by a film director Kohli as his fourth assistant. This means he does every menial job around a movie set, without getting paid.

He manages on conveyance money, living in a chawl. Tendulkar’s and Bedi’s observations of 70s or 80s Bollywood are spot on. The Punjabi filmmakers, who made commercial potboilers without a script; the South Indian leading lady who always travelled with an entourage that included her ferocious mother. This ‘take every day as it comes’ style of filmmaking, depending on stars and the audience’s mood, still managed a few hits, and even more flops that ruined producers.

Renamed Happy Singh by Kohli, who is generous with advice, if not money, the struggler eventually realises that his film career is going nowhere, He becomes gym instructor—he learnt the ways of fitness when he was building his body in the hope of stardom—and then a masseur. This skill was also taught to him by Kohli.

Bedi plays multiple parts—male and female—just by altering his voice and mannerisms, and has the audience rocking with laughter at Happy Singh’s misadventures in Mumbai. Bollywood has changed a lot since then, films are made with corporate professionalism, but the underdog still remains where he (she) was. The play could be updated to present times, and apart from the use of cell phones and computers, not much has changed in the way the fringe dwellers of Bollywood live in Mumbai. Instead of chawls, there are the shabby, shared suburban apartments, from which they all long to escape. Neither then, nor now, do they go back home because keeping the dream alive keeps them going.