Tomorrow, Today, the long-form interview series created and hosted by Shekhar Natarajan, has released a new episode featuring Neil Nitin Mukesh, an Indian film actor who has appeared in more than 35 films. The episode explores family, legacy, the realities of the Hindi film industry and the discipline behind a long acting career. In the conversation, Mukesh describes growing up in a middle-class household as the grandson of playback singer Mukesh and the son of singer Nitin Mukesh. He recounts how his father took on responsibility for the family after his grandfather’s death during a 1976 tour in the United States, and why he chose to keep both names in his own screen name to honor them.

Topics covered in the episode include:

– The values and selflessness he learned from his father and the drive he learned from his mother

– Discovering what playback singing meant as a child actor on his first film set

– The discipline his father instilled early, from fitness to lifestyle choices

– Typecasting and being judged by appearance and family name

– Roles that challenged expectations, including playing much older characters

– His interest in how artificial intelligence should be adopted alongside human emotion

“A struggle is not a bad thing. At least you’re struggling,” Mukesh said during the episode. “Because you have a dream.”

Mukesh also addresses perceptions that his family name made his career easy, describing the setbacks and rejections he has faced and his determination to keep working.

“We try to actually extract the soul of the person we are talking to, because that’s what makes them unique,” Shekhar Natarajan, host of Tomorrow, Today commented.