Paulette Hamilton 
When you meet Nick Rampal for the primary time, you’re a little surprised. He is a tall, good-looking guy in his 30s, with a smiling face, a booming voice, and an awesome profile. He is also disheveled and scruffy, and he has no longer troubled to iron his garments or shaves.
As he walks right into a mall eating place, his voice incorporates throughout the ground. He can pass off as an enterprise expert or a sportsperson even on a careless time off. He actually does now not appear like the main model. But that’s what he is.
Nick is, in truth, one of the fine-regarded models of Calcutta. He had modeled for the very mall where the eating place is located. You vaguely don’t forget his images within the classified ads for the mall and attempt to suit them with the man sitting in front of you.
But then Nick Rampal isn’t always Nick Rampal, in a couple of ways.
When told that he does no longer appear like his pics at all, Nick smiles. “Why have to I appear to be a version always? When I am running, I am dressed like a model. But it’s not most effective that,” he says. If he does not communicate inside the measured tone of showbiz people, he does no longer display their groomed reticence both; he does no longer forestall speaking. He lowers his voice. “When I am modeling, I am transformed. I exchange myself.”
Modeling is not just sporting garments, he says. “Actually, it’s not approximately clothing at all. I don’t care if the garments are properly or horrific. It is all approximately attitude. It’s how I look in the picture. That is modeling,” he says passionately. “But that’s after I am working. Otherwise, I am an exclusive man or woman. People don’t understand me in my building,” he says. He lives in a gated network in Tollygunge. “I like to hang around with others in the constructing premises. When I chat with others, I don’t want to be recognized as a model or something,” he says, in a difficult blend of English and Bengali.
He can also cross unrecognized because in Calcutta opportunities for modeling are restrained. Models are not very familiar faces. Nick has been in the enterprise for 10 years. He nevertheless feels he has an extended manner to head.
And yet he has arrived someplace. He has absolutely traveled a protracted distance from Bikrampur, a small, impoverished village in Bengal’s Bankura district, wherein the changed into born. Homes in his village did now not have energy till very these days. As a child, Nick went to a pathshala due to the fact there was no faculty. He says, “And we had been taught English simplest from Class VI.”
When he says he will no longer behave like a version whilst he isn’t working, he says it with pride, even vanity. He will no longer most effective not disown his roots; he’s going to display them. He will not forget himself to combo into the glamour international. He is who he is. Then once more, he is not. So blatantly that it nearly does no longer be counted. Was he born to a Bengali own family? Rampal is an uncommon surname for a Bengali. Nick pauses for some time. “Nick Rampal is not my real name,” he says. “My actual call is Falguni Patra.”
Falguni arrived in Calcutta in 2003, after his college-leaving assessments. His own family supported him, but they could not come up with the money for a whole lot. He joined Vidyasagar Evening College. Nick had large goals: of doing something large than existence, of becoming larger than lifestyles, shimmering with stardust, touched with tinsel. He knew he had the height and the body to enter the arena of glamour. He could find out that he had another very critical fine: the potential to grit his tooth and pass on, by no means thoughts what others have been saying, in no way mind the humiliation and rejection.
Rejection, specifically, changed into the top, he would find. Rejection would spur him on.
After approximately two years inside the city, when he was dwelling in tiny shared rooms, and college and research have been gradually receding into the heritage, he entered a “glam hunt”. He did not even make it to the top 30. It harms him. Determined, he entered the Gladrags Mr. India contest and was many of the top three inside the Japanese zone. “I went to Delhi,” says Nick.
Around that point, encouraged by using a cousin, he changed his call from Falguni Patra to Nick Rampal. Nick from Nick Arora, a man or woman played through Saif Ali Khan within the 2005 Yash Raj production, Salaam Namaste, one in every of the most important grasses of that year. In the movie, Nick Arora is a young, cool Indian who is going to Melbourne to make it large and meets Preity Zinta, every other Indian in Melbourne with the same aspirations. Rampal is from Arjun Rampal, one of the few version-turned-actors who may want to make a few marks in Bollywood. He says, “They would snigger at my name, ‘Falguni’. Said it sounded like a woman’s call. It was very hard for me, coming into this world.”
The new call turned into excellent take care of; a good entry point into modeling as he did atypical jobs, which includes promoting clothes, for a residing. Often, he could face the possibility of having no roof over his head. He might pass hungry. He would sleep in buddies’ houses, or make dwelling arrangements in trade for paintings. He has been available. “I even have visible the whole lot,” says Nick.