by Ahmad Rashad Arafa
Like others who put stock in pseudo-sciences, I personally always had a penchant for believing in signs, or whatever I discern to be a sign. When I first stumbled upon Dhruv Sehgal’s Instagram account a few years ago, after watching my first episode of his hit Netflix show, Little Things, what piqued my interest is that he posted the exact same song on his Instagram account that I posted on mine. I wouldn’t have made anything of had it not been a fairly obscure song by the fairly obscure indie-pop band, Alvvays.
I chose to reach out to him and I’m glad I did as we quickly discovered that we have a lot of other random shared interests – a love for Alexander Payne films, French philosophers, Marathi writers and we both agree that The Strokes’ debut album Is This It? heralded a new era of rock music in the 2000s.
Within a few minutes of our first conversation, I discovered that we had something else in common.
“Are you sick?” he asked after hearing me sniffling. “Aisi nahin bro, sirf todha thanda hoon” (“it’s nothing like that bro, I’m just a bit cold”) I said in my broken Hindi. “Yeah, I remember Kuwait being cold.” Dhruv seemed to be waiting for the opportune moment to let me know that he used to live here. I was taken aback. Kuwait is a small, unassuming country that, like other small, unassuming countries, has a dearth of worldwide celebrities.
“I was in Kuwait from fourth grade to seventh grade, from 1999 to 2002. My parents were diplomats so we stayed at the Indian embassy and I went to Fahaheel Al Watanieh Indian Private School.”
Shortly after returning to India and graduating college, Dhruv made a mark for himself writing and acting in viral comedy sketches for YouTube that raked in tens of millions of views. One of the sketches he created blossomed into the full-fledged show, Little Things.
The show, which revolves around a young couple navigating through the terrains of life in the sprawling metropolis that is Bombay, proved so monstrously successful that Netflix picked it up for its second season.
Now that it’s on its fourth and, much to its many fans’ chagrin, final season, I decided to take the opportunity to talk to Dhruv about his show’s final chapter, his time in Kuwait and how his sudden trajectory to Bollywood stardom reconstructed his life.
When asked about his fondest memories in Kuwait, Dhruv, true to his screen persona, remembers the little things fondly, “I remember having kebabs that have spoiled me for life, birthday parties at Pizza Hut and I also remember Hardees which I sadly haven’t had anywhere else in my life.” Oh that elusive Carl’s Jr.
“I also remember the beautiful ocean drives my family and I used to take and Kuwait’s abundance of space.” Dhruv also has a soft spot for the mall culture here, which he considers to be his “first tryst with capitalism.”
He may not have spent his entire childhood in Kuwait but the country evidently left a lasting impression on him, “a lot of my current interests came from the time I spent in Kuwait; the fact that I’m a huge Arsenal supporter and my taste in music, which I credit to Kuwait’s 99.7 FM English station.”
The fourth and final season of Little Things premiered on Netflix on October 15 where it quickly became one of the streaming platform’s top ten shows in India, UAE and other countries. It also struck a chord once again with its dedicated fan following in Turkey and telenovela-loving Latin American countries like Brazil and Mexico.
A departure from the third season, which was more languid in its pacing and had a heavy air of Euro existentialism – a change inspired by Dhruv’s personal muse, Lena Dunham, and her zeitgeisty show, Girls – the fourth season can be considered a return to the show’s warm and fuzzy earlier seasons.
“It is a back-to-basics of sorts. It’s also the first season I didn’t write. I’m happy with the outcome though, there’s a fair bit of natural progression in this final season.”
The general critical consensus is that the final season is a fitting conclusion but I personally found that it lacks the show’s trademark verisimilitude.
Still, the show has ended and Dhruv’s life will most likely never go back to what it once was. Scroll down any of the comments sections of his Instagram or Facebook posts and you’ll know why. Girls dig Dhruv. I mean they really like him. It took me a while but I think I finally figured out the reason.
From the outset, Dhruv appears to be your everyday handsome, sweet “Punju munda”, but watch a season of his show and/or spend an afternoon with him, and you realize that he’s also a vulnerable, brooding, melancholy, almost Heathcliffian figure.
While he and I were taking a short stroll around the neighborhood of Dadar in Bombay a couple years ago, we were soon met by a flock of eager-eyed college girls. They were hugging him, taking selfies with him and unflinchingly baring their souls to him. They were enraptured.
At first I thought it was endearing, I even volunteered to take pictures of them with Dhruv, but then it quickly descended into something that I could easily see be potentially suffocating.
Dhruv’s musings on the mercurial nature of fame echo other celebrities’, “I still don’t know how to process it. I think I can only handle small amounts of it. What I’m grateful for is that it has given my work credibility and that it’s also given me access to a lot of random acts of kindness from complete strangers. But I still find it all weird. I feel like I’m constantly being watched.”
Ahmad Rashad Arafa is a Palestinian Bollywood writer who runs the platform, Bollywood Over Hollywood, visit bollywoodoverhollywood.com to read his latest.
