When you meet Nick Rampal for the first time, you’re a little surprised. He is a tall, handsome guy in his 30s, with a smiling face, a booming voice, and a fantastic profile. He is likewise disheveled and scruffy, and he has not stricken to iron his garments or shave. As he walks right into a mall restaurant, his voice includes across the floor. He can skip off as a business professional or a sportsperson even on a clumsy time off. He certainly does no longer appear to be a leading version. But that’s what he is.
Nick is, in reality, one of the first-class-acknowledged models of Calcutta. He had modeled for the very mall in which the restaurant is placed. You vaguely bear in mind his pics inside the advertisements for the mall and try to shape them with the person sitting in front of you. But then Nick Rampal isn’t always Nick Rampal, in a couple of ways. When told that he does now not appear like his pictures at all, Nick smiles. “Why need to I look like a model continually? When I am running, I am dressed like a model. But it’s now not simplest that,” he says. If he does now not communicate in the measured tone of showbiz human beings, he does no longer show their groomed reticence either; he does now not stop speakme. He lowers his voice. “When I am modeling, I am transformed. I change myself.”
Modeling isn’t always simply wearing garments, he says. “Actually, it’s now not approximately garments at all. I don’t care if the garments are correct or bad. It is all an approximate mindset. It’s how I appearance within the photo. That is modeling,” he says passionately. “But that’s when I am working. Otherwise, I am a one-of-a-kind man or woman. People don’t realize me in my constructing,” he says. He lives in a gated community in Tollygunge. “I like to hang around with others in the constructing premises. When I chat with others, I don’t need to be acknowledged as a model or something,” he says, in a difficult mix of English and Bengali.
He also can pass unrecognized because, in Calcutta, opportunities for modeling are restrained. Models aren’t very familiar faces. Nick has been in the commercial enterprise for 10 years. He nonetheless feels he has a protracted way to head. And yet, he has arrived somewhere. He has, in reality, traveled a long distance from Bikrampur, a small, impoverished village in Bengal’s Bankura district, wherein he turned into born. Homes in his village did now not have power till very currently. As an infant, Nick went to a pathshala due to the fact there was no college. He says, “And we have been taught English only from Class VI.”
When he says he’s going to now not behave like a version while he is not operating, he says it with pride, even conceitedness. He will now best not disown his roots; he’s going to display them. He will now not forget himself to combination into the glamour world. He is who he’s. Then again, he isn’t always. So blatantly that it almost does not rely upon. Was he born to a Bengali own family? Rampal is an uncommon surname for a Bengali. Nick pauses for some time. “Nick Rampal isn’t always my real name,” he says. “My real call is Falguni Patra.”
Falguni arrived in Calcutta in 2003, after his school-leaving checks. His circle of relatives supported him. However, they couldn’t afford a whole lot. He joined Vidyasagar Evening College. Nick had large goals: of doing something large than existence, of becoming large than life, shimmering with stardust, touched with tinsel. He knew he had the peak and the physique to go into the arena of glamour. He could find out that he had any other very important nice: the ability to grit his teeth and go on, never thoughts what others had been pronouncing, by no means mind the humiliation and rejection.
Rejection, specifically, became excellent, he might find. Rejection would spur him on. After approximately years in the city, whilst he was dwelling in tiny shared rooms, and university and research had been steadily receding into the background, he entered a “glam hunt.” He did not even make it to the top 30. It hurt him. Determined, he entered the Gladrags Mr. India contest and became one of the top 3 in the jap region. “I went to Delhi,” says Nick.
Nick from Nick Arora, a character played with the aid of Saif Ali Khan in the 2005 Yash Raj manufacturing, Salaam Namaste, one of the biggest grossers of that year. In the movie, Nick Arora is a young, cool Indian who goes to Melbourne to make it big and meets Preity Zinta, some other Indian in Melbourne with the same aspirations. Rampal is from Arjun Rampal, one of the few version-turned-actors who ought to make some mark in Bollywood. Around that time, encouraged using a cousin, he modified his name from Falguni Patra to Nick Rampal. He says, “They could chuckle at my call, ‘Falguni.’ Said it gave the impression of a lady’s name. It becomes very hard for me, entering this global.”
The new call became amazing to take care of, a great entry factor into modeling as he did atypical jobs, including promoting clothes for a living. Often, he could face the chance of getting no roof over his head. He might move hungry. He might sleep in friends’ homes or make living preparations in exchange for work. He has been available. “I actually have visible the whole thing,” says Nick.
He did no longer surrender. Something in him — his doggedness mainly — attracts human beings. His directness too. He can cross up and communicate with anyone. Nick caught the attention of choreographer and version coordinator Ashish Banerjee. Banerjee groomed Nick for the ramp and gave him confidence and affection. Banerjee would skip away soon after Nick met him. A loss Nick is but to recover from.
By this time, he had all started to get observed. He started to get calls for huge-price ticket occasions and well-known designers. Calcutta clothier Abhishek Dutta, he recollects gratefully, featured him at Kolkata Fashion Week in 2009. Debarun, any other town designer, took him to the following stage by providing him on the 2011 Lakme India Fashion Week. Nick would also take part inside the 2015 Lakme Indian Fashion Week, carrying the designs of Shantanu and Nikhil and Arjun Khanna. He might be visible in Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s garments as properly.
