Chillz Ice Cream – A Mother Dairy Product – Commercial Shoot

The next morning, I was to work in Colaba on a commercial. After the previous day’s travel nightmare, being able to walk to work was a most pleasant contrast. Altir took me to the shoot, which was housed in a bunch of clapped out old warehouses right by the port.

There I met Paris, a young French woman, who has been in India for 10 years, living as an actor no less. I found this most encouraging. Since they hadn’t even finished preparing the set, Paris, Peti, a young Hungarian guy and I went out to the waterfront and just lay and sunned ourselves. When they came to get us for costumes, I was able to wear the shorts I came in, and got an even looser fitting T shirt. What a contrast from the day before, in all senses. So while it was just as hot, at least we were in comfortable clothes and the atmosphere was a lot more relaxed.

The theme of the commercial was wheelchair basketball, which I thought was a bit retarded for pushing this ice cream. I was supposed to be in the crowd cheering on the game, which had been shot the day before. The directors loved me. I did everything I was told. I jumped up and down, cheered and gesticulated. One thing that surprised me is that they used the real ice cream product. You would think that they’d have a mock up of some sort, given the grueling heat, but no. At one point, when jumping, the chocolate soup in my cone splattered all over and I had to be cleaned up.

The jumping and cheering took up the better part of the morning. Over lunch I chatted with Gabriela, who was ostensibly from Sweden. Now here was an interesting figure: father from Chile, mother from Finland, first language Spanish, lived in Sweden, Chile and Spain, traveled in India, Africa and South America, and an archetypal example of what I would term Nationally Confused. We immediately hit it off and I promised to profile her for the series of the same name.

In the afternoon, Paris and I had to walk across the set smiling and chatting while the wheelchair-bound heroes were chomping on endless bars of ice cream. It was fun.

A final point of interest was that the director’s name was also Andre, and as a Goan, it too was of Portuguese inspiration. He also had a shaved head. But he was quite a bit darker than me.

In the end, I told Amjad that since I had come to write about movies, that I would do one more commercial since I had already promised, but afterwards, I only wanted to do films with big name stars, and preferably song sequences. He readily agreed. So sit back, because there’s more to come.