JAWAD ALI
“I am a Samahaarian because I have fought for what I believe all my life and my belief is that the only life worth living is one you are really passionate about”
The concept of being able to live a life which is so different from your own, the chance to step in to the shoes of a character you never knew is what attracted this engineering dropout slash photographer slash filmmaker to step onto the stage for acting. Jawad had finished 4 years of engineering and yet he decided not to take up the final exams.
Having been fed up of engineering and also wanting to act and yet not finding lack of opportunities, he was guided by a friend to go to shoelace dramatics, a local amateur theatre group, where he ended up taking part in a couple of theatre workshops. From there he was introduced to Ingenium Dramatics, another local theatre group, where he got to act in his first play ‘Take 2’. His second play happened to be with Shoelace Dramatics itself and was directed by Rathna Shekar Reddy. From there began his association with Samahaara and Jawad continued to be a part of the theatre fests organized by the group itself.
His time with Samahaara led him to discover himself and gave him the confidence to pursue his passions even more aggressively. An introvert before, he found himself transforming during his time with Samahaara and started his journey on the discovery of the self. A man of few friends, he started getting involved with a lot of activities, became a lot more outgoing and also started chasing his passion for photography with more zeal. In the process, he discovered his love for clicking faces. Earlier, he had treated it as a hobby, and now he knows it is his love and passion. Not just that, he found Samahaara workshops were a lot of fun too and that enjoyment actually started to reflect back in his acting, in his interaction with people, in his photography, in himself and life as such- a positive change to say the very least.
Since then, he has worked in a couple of plays, made few films (one of which recently got selected for screening at a well known film festival), clicked a couple of hundreds… And the list keeps growing as he continues to discover more. The thing that he takes back from Samahaara is that he now knows not to wait but to act, to keep creating and move forward continuously.