There was no place for me other than Cinema

She has over 65 movies to her credit, has won the Tamil Nadu State Film Award Special Prize for her film Namma Ooru Poovathaa and has appeared in some of Tamil cinema’s most popular films, including Rickshaw Mama, Guru Sishyan and Thevarmagan. But actor Gauthami says she didn’t plan any of it. Speaking at TEDx Chennai, the actor revealed how she passed out the first time she heard her director say the word ‘action’!

“I couldn’t take the heat. I was too delicate and pampered,” she said, recalling how when she earned herself a seat in an engineering college and had the rest of her life planned out.

“I wanted to pursue an MBA and specialise in International Business and Finance,” she said. But when she got the offer to do a cameo in a film, her life took a turn she’d never imagined. “The decision was mine,” she said, remembering how her mother advised her to explore the new opportunity that was given to her. If not for anything else, at least so that she wouldn’t have had any regrets later in life.

“So I packed my bags and came to Madras,” she said. But somewhere along the way, she suddenly realised that she was in a whole new universe. “I did have a plan. And one year down the line, I tossed everything out the window. Not because I didn’t like what I was doing. But because there was no other place on Earth where I would rather have been,” she explained, “It (Cinema) was the right place for me.”

By recounting her own life’s experiences, Gauthami compared her nature as a mother with that of her mother’s. “My daughter turned 13 last week. I was pushing her to do what I thought was best for her. But then I realised that I was not being the mother to her that my mother was to me,” she said.

It’s always about yourself when you set your goals, was the point that she was trying to make. “Live your life with passion. Life will throw curveballs at you. And there will be many curveballs — I had cancer and I survived it,” she said. Like anybody else would have done, she did ask the question ‘Why me?’ more than once, but she soon realised that it was a message from her “body or the universe or whatever you choose to call it.” The universe was telling her that the road she was charging down was not important, she said. “It’s about today. It’s about living life to the fullest, with responsibility.”