Life's Enduring Seescapes

Actor Arjun Rampal travels down memory lane and holds forth on the transformative journeys that have defined him, and his life, beyond work.

- SUHANI SINGH

Arjun Rampal is what one would describe as a universal traveller. Life has taken him from Jabalpur, his birthplace, to Deolali, the army base where his maternal grandfather Brigadier Gurdayal Singh was stationed, to the lush hills of Kodaikanal, where he did his schooling. “I felt I had reached Riverdale or something. It was alien to everything that I had been surrounded with,” he says of his days in Kodi. After a childhood spread across several small towns, he arrived in New Delhi to pursue college and then moved to Bombay to start off a career as a model. There’s also an adventurous chapter in London and later in New York, where at one point he was so broke that he slept in Central Park for three nights until he was saved by a gig—to be a friend’s dog-sitter in Soho. Rampal calls Milo, the pet, his good luck charm because it was post that he was selected to walk for big brands at New York Fashion Week. Forever an adventurer, Rampal has trekked Siachen glacier and sailed the coast of Turkey with his two daughters, Mahikaa and Myra, from ex-wife Mehr Jesia. And we haven’t even touched on the travel he has done for the fifty-odd films he has done in a career spanning over 25 years.