Selvrealisering i Bobby Nayyars 'Hollywood'

We all have a period in our young life, where we are figuring out who we want to be, and whether this ideal self that we’ve set for ourselves is achievable or not. This quest for self-realization is a constant struggle for many young adults. In the short story “Hollywood” published in 2010, by Bobby Nayyar, the main character Tarsem Singh, who is a freshly graduated young man, is faced with exactly these struggles of self-realization.The short story is written in a first-person narrator, which puts the perspective in the eyes of Tarzem Singh and exposes the reader to his mind. The story is set in London where Tarsem lives with his Middle-Eastern parents. He is unemployed and goes to the Jobcentre Plus on Mayes Road every second Tuesday to sign in for possible employment, and his father is very disappointed in him because of this. “I would wake with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, for I – Tarsem Singh – am one of the three million unemployed in this fair green land”. It is killing him to disappoint his father by being unemployed, it is giving him so much emotional stress that he is physically experiencing it as an uneasy feeling in his stomach. The story starts off with Tarsem ranting about his love for cinemas, and he surely has a passion for them. Tarsem prefers the cheap cinema Hollywood because it gives “value for money”, and he even considers it a piece of London’s cultural identity.Tarsem has a lack of confidence, both in his looks and social skills. “I had that peculiar Asian male trait: thin legs and arms with a rounded belly, a bit like a frog I guess”. A frog isn’t considered anything close to what the ideal male body type should be, so the fact that he describes himself as having the body type of a frog instead of maybe a Greek god, shows that he doesn’t think very highly of his body. His nervousness around women is shown when he one day visits the cinema alone, and the only one else in the cinema is a pretty woman. ”Manny popped into my head. My friend of many years. […] “When a woman looks at you, you have a window of opportunity of no more than 3 seconds. After 3 seconds you may as well not exist.” Oh Manny. I waited 127 minutes.” His nervousness is shown by the fact that he thinks so much about the situation that he knows the minutes since she last looked at him and follows an advice that his friend Manny had given him. But despite his complete lack of confidence, Tarsem somehow manages to pull through with the beautiful woman Sae. Sae is intrigued by Tarsem’s goal of becoming a poet and says to him “Write me a Poem. If I like it, I’ll go out with you again” She is very selective in the way that she will only go out with him if she likes his Poem. Sae Nakamura is physical free, because she travels a lot and comes from a wealthy family that pays for her, but in the psychological way she feels trapped, and isn’t happy, which is how she feels that she relates to Tarsem.