Our first stop after leaving Vienna was India’s largest city Mumbai, the “capital” of the Bollywood-film industry. What would be cooler than playing a little role in one of those colorful fancy films – in original Lederhosen, as you could imagine!

Day 1. Talking with the hostel manager about our plans regarding Bollywood, he gave us an address of a production office in the middle of nowhere. At site, the first office we found turned out to be a movie shop. “You are definitely not right here. Try it at the fourth floor”, a nice lady advised us. Unfortunately, the other company was specialized on picture shooting. “Maybe you find help on the first floor “. Knocking again, a friendly guy opened. He also had no clue about castings for movies, but he gave us two names of production studios.

Day 2. Highly motivated and equipped with a list of reference addresses and telephone numbers, we freshly restarted into a new day of chasing for a role in a film. Bollywood, we are coming! Once again not successful entering several large movie production businesses, we headed towards the inner city where sometimes scouts are searching for foreign extras, only that we did not encounter a single one.

Day 3. After visiting elephant island, we went to the tourist information, with was already closed. A female civil servant working in a little chamber in the depth of the nearby train booking office called some numbers for us without any utilizable output. Again, we had to rearrange our plans.

Day 4. The collected contacts from various film producers failed bringing us into the movie business so far. Therefore, we headed towards ”film city” – nomen est omen. Refusal to entry via the first gate did not hinder us to try our luck two kilometers away at the second excess entrance. But: No admission without permission! Next stop – Indian tourist development cooperation near the railway station Church Gate. Employing three further employees with our request, we got two more telephone numbers from the film industry which we immediately called. The outcome was – again: No admission without permission!

We tried a lot, but anyway – acting in a Bollywood movie was a classical Fail…