Not many of us can say that they have made an erstwhile president of the nation laugh with his five minute set of mimicking the likes of Rajinikanth, Shah Rukh Khan and Ajith Kumar.
Yet, that is exactly what this Bengalurean has done – only now, his performance venues have become more varied than the late Dr APJ Abdul Kalam’s chambers at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Amit Srinivasan speaks through the voices of the biggest stars we know and he does it by being one of the very few professional mimics in this city.
It all began in a classroom in Jamshedpur for this master of mimicking. “Like any other student, I realised that I had a particular affinity for mimicking my teachers by the time I was in eighth standard. I remember that there was a stage show on the occasion of the school president’s birthday and one of my friends who was a school captain pushed me to perform on stage. The laughs that day ended with me becoming a recognisable face eventually,” says Amit, who is an app developer by day.
From Jamshedpur, Amit then went on to quaint Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu where he immediately began collecting awards with his ace acts in Tamil and Hindi. “I came first in the state in the mimicry competition and by the time I was in the final year of college, I was part of a group that had toured India and performed for the president. I then came to Bengaluru with the idea of doing theatre, dabbling in cinema and even acted in a play called Honey, Let’s Break Up at Ranga Shankara. But it was without remuneration, so while I ended up working in pretty much all the well-known computer firms in the city, and did hundreds of corporate shows,” says the man who then went on to develop his own act that combines a monologue, fits in a break, and then goes onto mimicry.
The life of a mimic who depends on his art for his livelihood is not easy. Although Amit provides what he calls ‘a buffet of entertainment options’ in his solo shows for his audience, his life off stage is like any other struggling artistes’. “I am always practicing. It is not like I will sit down to fix a routine the day before my show. I never use mimicry to pull pranks on my friends because I don’t think I can use it as a weapon like this. I am here because of the sacrifices made by my hardworking mother, my father who helped me a lot, and my wife who overcame the boundaries of religion to stand by me in every thing I do. I have a beautiful four-year-old daughter who I have to dream for as well,” says Amit.
