American editor Varun Viswanath, who grew up as a Tamil-Malayali Bengaluru boy, spent a typical morning wrangling his son into the car before his phone started to blow up. It’s Patrick, his co-editor, who almost never calls. “We did it! We got nominated!” For the first-time Emmy nominee, the memory of a young Varun wrestling with stage lights in Bengaluru city hall seemed like a lifetime ago.
The predilection for orchestrating behind the scenes, seems to have foreseen the career he would eventually embrace. At 18, a scholarship whisked him away to Singapore, where he was expected to pursue a path well-trodden by the Indian diaspora. While his peers saw only the allure of giants like Sony or Nokia, for Varun, the stage and the screen beckoned.
Extra-curricular activities became his lifeline, and he transformed from an aspiring engineer to a storyteller, albeit one who still knew his way around a soldering iron. The 2008 financial crisis was the deus ex machina that nudged him towards his true calling. As the corporate grind lost its sheen, the chaos of filmmaking became his sanctuary.
A serendipitous connection with director Anurag Kashyap, who optioned a friend’s book, catalysed this shift. A feature film, shot on a shoestring budget in Singapore, was the tipping point. Masking his artistic aspirations under the guise of MBA applications, Varun landed a spot in the American Film Institute’s (AFI) editing programme.
Here, amid classmates who had already won Emmys and.