There are many advantages of being a freelance artist. It is a beautiful experience that I genuinely believe everyone should experience once in life. You feel like your own master. You wake up when you want to, although that is usually post the first taunt by parents. You sleep when you want to, albeit that’s once your girlfriend has decided the nightly telephonic conversation has been long enough. You work when you want, that is, depending on the whims of the client you’re working for. But you get the gist, it is an enjoyable experience.

At times you feel like a celebrity, with a lot of messages of appreciation and friend requests coming your way.  When I say ‘a lot’ of friend requests and messages, I mean by guy standards, which is still equivalent to probably one-fifth of how much a regular girl gets. It’s hilarious if you think of it. You could call me a recognisable comedian in the Indian circuit, who has performed all over the country to thousands of audience members with numerous corporate and public shows under his belt, and still I get as much internet attention (messages and friend requests) as an 18-yr old girl who’s just, eh, a girl. She doesn't need to be a girl with any particular achievement or distinction unless you count a pout on display picture as one. All she needs to be is just a girl. Internet as a playing field seems to be as much favourable towards the fairer sex (if that’s still an allowable reference, you never know these days) as the real world is the complete opposite of that.

Anyway, the point is that I quite like my life as a freelance artist. Mostly, that is. One of the not-so-enjoyable experiences of working as a freelance artist has to be, and I cannot assert this enough, payment issues. This seems to be a genuine issue with our entire country itself, that of delaying or stopping payments. Now I’m not sure if this issue is faced as much in other countries as well, since most of my life-experience has been limited to our sweet nation. But being a middle-class guy who’s heard about various Indian problems all his life that ‘pata hai, foreign mei aisa kuch nahi hota’, (be it traffic-issues, slow government functioning or lack of early-age sex) I would like to believe that even this issue is way more severe in our blessed country.

Delaying or stopping payments just comes very naturally to our country. And probably our conditioning about this has happened without even realising it. Let’s recall all the times vendors, such as the ‘kudawala’, ‘newspaperwala’, have come over to our place to collect their monthly dues. For some odd reason, ‘Bhaiya kal lei lena’ was our parents’ spontaneous response in all such cases. I don’t even know why most Indian parents do this? It’s not like in the one or two days that they delay the payment, they would invest it in some awesome shares and make millions of it. Why delay this menial payment for a day? Maybe it was just that the kudawaala did not look desperate enough. Maybe the need just didn't seem visible on his face on the first day itself. I’m pretty sure if every house in a society pays the kudawala his monthly dues on the very day he asks, he would probably break down in tears or start pinching himself to check if he’s not dreaming.

Jokes aside, if I get a tenner for every time I have had to remind, re-remind, re-re-remind, drop a message, call from other numbers to remind (the ‘re’ versions of these as well) a client for pending payment, I really think I could give the Ambanis a competition. (ok, thoda zyada ho gaya but again, you get the gist). And not just I, pretty much every one of my friends in the comedy industry, if not from the entire freelance artist world, have such similar tales of horror. From something wrong with the system, to boss is not present to sign the cheques, to courier got lost, I have heard it all. Sometimes I feel like writing a ScoopWhoop kind of article, ‘15 reasons they would give to delay your well-deserved payment’.

Before this starts becoming a rant, I would just like to end with a sincere request to all the readers of this meaningless blog. If you ever see anyone; be it parents, friends, boss, co-workers or just acquaintance, stopping or unnecessarily delaying anybody’s payment without any adequate reason, please take a stand and try to prevent it from happening. Somehow try to drill logic in that person in making them understand what they are doing is wrong. Or just embarrass them. Just do something. The base of service industry is in this sincerity, that on the basis of pre-agreed terms, payment would and should be made on time. For a service provider, a payment is almost like Justice. If it is delayed, somehow the value attached to it just does not stay the same. 

Off late, ‘following your passion and chasing your dreams’ seems to have become the new MBA. Everybody around seems to be interested in pursuing it. It’s a nice trend of course. Every second person I see around is either a photographer, an aspiring actor, a wannabe stand-up comic, a theatre enthusiast, a blogger, a traveller, a discoverer of truth, searcher of self and god knows what all. I think eventually we’ll get to a day where a son will hesitantly go to his mother and say with great deliberation, “Maa, I want to do something different in my career. I want to become an engineer”. (Followed by Ekta Kapoor serial effect of thalis falling, bangles breaking and Mom going ‘Kya, Kya, Kya’ in loop). Even the mother would reply with great vigour, “Have you gone out of your mind. Even your father used to say such stupid things in his early days. Then one day entered in his life a magical DSLR”.

I can hardly complain about this ‘chasing your dreams phenomenon’ since most people would see me as a part of this as well. Exactly a year back in May 2014, after having been a part of the comedy circuit for four years (my first open mic - 2010), I took the leap of joining sort of the same bandwagon and became a full-time professional comedian. What I had to do for that was quite simply, quit my day-job. It is sort of hilarious if you think about it.

P1: How do you become a full time stand-up comedian?

P2: Well whatever you were doing alongside comedy, just stop doing that. Presto!!

P1: So in order to become a full-time comedian, I don’t really have to do anything additional? Just stop doing something eh?

P2: Yup, exactly that!!

P1: Woohoo, full time comedy, here I come!!

So May 2014 it was, when I served the last day of a regular job. Regular in the sense, a typical corporate job. A Gurgaon-based, post-MBA, jazzy lingo-throwing, traffic-cursing, project-obsessing, manager-praising, team-dinner going, HR-hating job. Not that I am looking down at it. No way, I had great fun doing all that. Managing all that with a comedy career was crazy fun. Performing stand-up shows at nights at pubs, bars or colleges, where you get the thrill of your life, and then heading the next morning to office, all professionally-dressed from time to time talking about decks and synergy, was the closest I ever felt to batman. It really was most entertaining.

Moreover, my day-job had got me to travel abroad thrice in a couple of years and as a middle-class kid who’s told all his life that the nirvana-attainment path involves ‘foreign jaana’, I really could not ask for more. Plus, I was blessed with a flexible job which allowed me to not only to work remotely, but also work from different cities, helped me take many travelling shows that just wouldn't have been possible otherwise. To make matters interesting, when I finally decided to make that step, an international client visit opportunity was coming my way to none other than the holy lands of Brazil, incidentally during the time of the world cup. If that’s a temptation to a normal human being, for us Bengalis, who’d happily sacrifice the entire cricket world cup just so that they can watch ten minutes of the beautiful game, that really was equivalent to Sunnly Leone in lingerie saying 'ek second idhar aana'.

So why exactly did I quit all that and take up comedy full-time. Quite frankly, because it started seeming like a financially-sound step. I started making more of comedy than my monthly job earnings on a regular level. I knew where my day-job increments would take me in 5-6 years and thought with more effort I could do way better in comedy in terms of earnings. Not to say that my love for comedy was not one of the prime decisions. That had always been there for the last four years. But for the first time that love for what you do had the financial backing to actually make the leap.

Which gets me back to what I started with. The whole ‘follow your passion’ routine and how keenly one should take it up. Sure, it’s nice to follow your passion but what’s nicer is to have some money in your pocket while doing so. If we let go of what we have in order to wonder off to unknown terrains where nothing is fixed, we might have to come back to exactly where we were in the first place with even more resentment.

To everybody who is interested in following their passion, my advice would be to first get to a place where they are assured of something stable and then let go off whatever other regular thing they were doing. Stretch yourself in dedicating time to both till you get to that point. All those dreamy lines of ‘If you want something bad enough, the universe conspires to give it to you’ sounds nice when Shah Rukh is emoting them with arms spread wide open. But honestly, the universe does not give a shit. If you want something bad enough, you have to go and get it and that’s that.

(And no we are not talking girls here my high-on-testosterone Delhi boy. No ‘go and get it’ on that front. That’s got to be mutual. There’s a reason those are called matters of the heart)