If you don’t tell your own story, no one else will,” filmmaker Mira Nair tells aspiring directors in her MasterClass — advice that tech entrepreneur Ankur Singla found particularly encouraging. Singla had run a film club during his years at the National Law School, and after selling his tech start-up to Amazon in 2018, admits to going through “a bit of an existential crisis”. There was the long-nurtured love for cinema, but there was also the sense of a barrier in converting it into a vocation. But it was in the COVID years, after enrolling in a series of cinematography, screenwriting and filmmaking courses, that he truly took Mira Nair’s advice to heart and began revisiting and inscribing his memories of his school years in Chandigarh. The result is Ghich Pich, which releases in theatres on August 8. 

“With a career shift, you have to start as a beginner. You are almost as good as an intern,” shares the first-time filmmaker. While his entrepreneurial background gave him the communication and team management skills he needed on set as a director, there were plenty of new skills to acquire in this career pivot which he describes as involving a shift from being a left-brained to a right-brained person. “Running a company requires analytical skills. You’re always thinking in the future. With writing and directing, you have to stay in the moment and observe things. It’s a very different part of your brain that gets activated when you want to make a film.”