‘I mean—’ Sammy began, but just then Aryan, who had been getting increasingly fidgety, latched on to her bare arm and began gumming it furiously and she rushed inside with an anguished yell.

‘Who’s the Yudi guy?’ Rishi asked, raising an interested eyebrow as he poured himself a mug of coffee.

‘Oh, nobody,’ I sighed. ‘Damn it, I wish I had never met the guy!’

Eight

‘Aunty, can you watch over my mobile while I go for the next shot, please?’ The pimply little geek peered at me earnestly from behind horn-rimmed glasses and I glared back at him. We were in the middle of the Bright Biscuits ad shoot and there was a mad frenzy all around as the production crew scurried helter-skelter to get the props in place before the next bit of the shoot began.

We had been shooting in Stardust Studios, one of the largest and best-equipped studios in Mumbai, for three days straight now and today was hopefully going to be the last day, provided the little horrors we were shooting with didn’t have any more of their starry tantrums. Bright Biscuits was targeted at young adolescents between thirteen and seventeen years of age—urban, articulate, tech-savvy kids who lived intensely competitive lives. These kids were the prime target for Bright Biscuits given that they were at that crucial life stage where they would either be in the throes of competitive exams or would soon need to start prepping for them. Bright Biscuits would fit right into their lives with its delicious, healthy and ‘makes you mentally sharp’ proposition.

We had decided to give the ad film a funky but feel-good touch. The plan was to shoot a series of short films that would revolve around the central characters of a thirteen-year-old girl and her geeky sixteen-year-old brother, narrating how they managed to get out of different kinds of sticky situations with the help of Bright Biscuits. The message was simple—kids who munched on Bright Biscuits stayed sharp, anywhere, anytime.

We had auditioned tens of kids to find the right ones who would fit the characters we had created and had finally narrowed it down to Divya and Siddharth, two fresh-faced little enthu cutlets who were already quite the rage on the ad film circuit, having appeared in several ads targeted at their ilk. Their popularity had obviously gone to their heads as I found out the hard way once we began shooting with them. With demands ranging from ‘I want only Domino’s Pizza for lunch, nothing else will do!’ to interrupting the shoot for an hour-long ‘urgent’ phone call, these kids were driving me up the wall. And now that little pest Siddharth was calling me ‘aunty’. My life as a relatively kinder and significantly younger-sounding ‘didi’ was over.

Sighing, I tucked Siddharth’s mobile into the pocket of my jeans and decided to do a quick check around the studio to see that everything was in order. As I looked around at the flurry of activity all around me, I felt the familiar warm rush of emotion I’d been feeling ever since the script I’d worked so hard on had started taking on a life of its own as it evolved into an ad film.