Clicking a living

The shutter bug infected actor Boman Irani while he was still selling wafers at his family’s Grant Road shop, Golden Wafers.

"It used to bug me that I couldn’t even afford to take my family for a proper holiday. I didn’t have any professional knowledge and getting a photographer’s job in a magazine was out of the question. So armed with a Pentex K1000, I started going to various maidans of Bombay, looking for subjects,” he told the Mumbai Mirror (MM) reporter Sayoni Sinha (July 4, 2010).

Irani shot inter-school cricket matches and made enough money to take his family on a holiday to Ooty. "With that much money, we got below average rooms in a hotel. This wasn’t the life I wanted for my family,” he recalls.

With renewed vigor, he took up photography on a full-time basis, reports MM, going to Poona and taking aerial shots of a bike race. Fortune smiled on him when the editor of a bike magazine bought all his pictures and recommended that he cover the Boxing World Cup, scheduled to take place in Bombay. "I was at my wit’s end on how to gain access to the boxers as I wasn’t affiliated to any media house. So (the editor) suggested that I approach Aspy Adajania, the chairman of Bombay Boxing Association and ask him for an official photographer’s job,” Irani says.

Boman Irani: life behind the camera Photo: Sarosh Daruwalla, Mazda Audio Video Lab

But Adajania told him that official photographers were not required. "He looked at me and asked if I have ever shot a boxing match. I said no and told him that I will practice,” Irani recalls. Since the boxing match was six months away Adajania suggested that he practice by going for the Western Indian finals at the University Stadium. Irani shot various pictures and went back to Adajania. But he was in for a surprise when the latter had the contract letter ready and an official photographer’s jacket too. He didn’t even look at the pictures! "I took a lot of pictures during the Boxing World Cup and I was paid an unbelievable amount of money for some of the pictures I took. Not only that, cheques were sent to me for the next six months, whenever my pictures were used,” Irani reminisces.

It was only because he was a photographer that Irani came in contact with theater, and later films. Years later, life came full circle when he worked in Homi Adaja­nia’s Being Cyrus. It was Homi’s father who had given him a start. "To find one’s calling is perhaps not the easiest thing in the world, but probably the most important,” Irani muses.