Introduction. Dwelling in no man’s land between celebrity and obscurity

 I got threatened with a ban for impersonating myself when I made my first post on another social media app recently. I may have underestimated my resemblance to myself when I posted this picture.   

 

Herein lies the paradox. This picture is me posing as a celebrity and posting as a nobody. Because who am I expecting to know me on an international social media platform. My verified accounts on Instagram and Facebook with a combined following of over 200k might tell you I am relatively famous. I am curious to know if there are people in this community who might have heard of me as that guy in that movie. I would love to connect and confirm your prejudgements. And for those who haven’t, I am guessing almost everybody who is reading this, let me explain. Meanwhile you are welcome to visit me on my Instagram, Facebook or YouTube accounts where I post as a content creator and film actor. I will also share the link to my steemit profile on these pages to help verify my identity. But fair warning, these are celebritized versions of myself.   

 https://www.instagram.com/thesudevnair/ 

 https://www.facebook.com/TheSudevNair/ 

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Kz-BKN4XOfK6dvamNQiXQ 

 I am an actor in Indian films. If you narrow it down to just South Indian films, my popularity increases ten fold. If you further narrow it down to just Malayalam films, (Produced and consumed only by a small market of Malayalam speaking audience primarily in the state of Kerala; with an annual box office return of around 40 million USD per annum) my popularity rises to selfie seeking and finger pointing in public spaces.   

And if you further narrow it down to my neighbourhood in Kerala, my services are routinely requested over the phone by an acquaintance, to say hi to a fan standing beside him. I have learnt over time that these are mostly not my fans and need to be reminded which film they might have last seen me in.

In reality, I am inconsequential. I am well known to a small and loyal fan base but I am not a star. I don’t draw audiences to the cinema halls under my name. Not even my mother and all her children. My contribution to movies is limited to the good looking bad guy who steps out of expensive vehicles to catchy background music, delivering punch lines;

Or the bankable good actor who is reasonably cheap yet worthy enough to take art house movies into reputed festivals. Neither of these roles in the Malayalam film Industry pay enough to afford a car or an Uber ride beyond 4 kms.

I do however, hold a very important and rare distinction. I was awarded the Kerala State Film Award for Best Actor for my debut film back in 2015.

Receiving the Kerala State Film Award itself is a very very big feat, something big stalwarts have spent their careers pining over. Achieving that accolade for your very first film is the stuff of legends. I was all over the news and media. I was destined to be a force to reckon with, exactly until the next star son’s career was launched by his father 62.5 days later. Cut to 2020, I am still watching the same Woody Allen films that filled me with hope in this meaningless, penniless existence 10 years ago.

So what went wrong? Nothing. An artistic award is very different from a popular award in my country. State Awards and National Awards are for the serious actors and the popular awards like Filmfare, Star Screen etc. are for the stars. The latter are mostly always rigged. These award nights are mainly excuses for big media corporations to host an event with lots of sponsors and big stars and performances and walk away with huge profits. I have been invited to these events. They are worse than spending an evening with an Insurance Salesman. I told them curtly that I am not going to grace them with my presence next time unless they give me one of the popular awards too. They asked me to remind them which film they might have last seen me in. To cut a long story short, it takes time to be popular among the audience unless you have some stroke of good luck or are born in a film family and are launched into stardom with the expensive marketing and PR that comes with it. I have only acting skills. None of the other good stuff. Except maybe selling Insurance.

I therefore find myself in a strange predicament. I have a reputation that prevents me from accepting roles that are beneath a certain level of significance and a limitation in audience reach that prevents me from being offered roles above a certain level of significance. The only thing thinner than the slice that remains is my wallet.

Along the way I also made waves as a content creator. Even before my award, I made this really irreverent, self deprecating comedy show about struggling actors called Not Fit, extrapolating from my own experiences as a struggling actor.

Once again, the show became critically acclaimed, got a bunch of awards, was featured on all the lists of best web shows of the year in India, but did not do well on a mass scale. Apparently the humor was too subtle for the Indian audience, and the mockumentary format which I introduced in India for the first time did not catch on. Several attempts have been made after Not Fit at the mockumentary format and none have caught on, in my opinion because of the creators’ bad understanding of the format, but they argue the audience isn’t ready for it, and now nobody will touch my genre of humor. Every time I pitch a show, I am asked, “On a scale of 1 to Sudev, how outrageous is it? We are only looking for 0 and lower, preferably a Karan Johar.”

So I started making my own content, around Stephen Fry on a scale of 1 to Sudev. These were designed as 1 min videos for Instagram because that was the hot thing back then and I later uploaded them on YouTube for ease of sharing. And my following on Instagram and Facebook blew up as a result. First, I made a series about my cat, going into detail gathering evidence how they are alien spy beings sent to control us humans.

Then I made a series on life as an introvert.

My Introvert musings gained so much popularity, I even ended up giving a Ted Talk on the subject. “How to be successful as an introvert” I told them after my speech that I couldn’t decide whether to keep it light and funny or deep and meaningful. Let’s hope it was funny, they said.

Once that series concluded, I made a series called “How to be an Extrovert”, featuring myself as Dr. Saajan Sumesh, an ex introvert, closeted male chauvinist creepy uncle, and now an expert and professional extrovert. This series is on its way to conclusion in the next few weeks.

As one might expect, life as a content creator can be very unfulfilling once you catch on to the machinations of the social media platforms. First they lure you in. Then once they hit their ceiling of users, they reduce the organic reach and now you have to pay for content to reach your own audience that you painstakingly built over the years and helped build the platform in the first place. It is pretty ridiculous and downright exploitative. I refused to be sucked into their little game and started shopping around for more meaningful platforms where creators have the power and they are not pawns in the platform’s designs. That’s how I chanced upon Steemit and after having spent a good 3 days going through the documentation on how it works and its community, I am really pumped about what is in store. Eventually, what does a creator crave for? It’s not actually money. It’s a good insurance agent and a popular award. But nobody is giving me any of those. So I want reach, respect and influence. Money is merely an indicator of these things. Which is very much in line with Steemit’s own philosophy.

Just to make sure I am not banned again for impersonating someone perceived as famous, I will leave this picture of a famous celebrity here.