The year was 2007 when, with an old dictaphone in hand, I decided to formally record the stories of my maternal grandfather, Ram Tipnis, the oldest living Hindi cinema make-up artist at the time. My vivid childhood memory is of him recounting experiences from his father’s travelling theatre company, his trips abroad, and the many stories of his life as a make-up artist from 1942 to 1995. While most children my age were listening to fairy tales, I had a front-row seat to the world of Hindi cinema. Stories of a dancing superstar of the 1960s driving down a narrow, hilly road at breakneck speed, swerving around perilous corners fuelled my evenings: edge-of-the-seat stuff for a nine-year-old!