A LIFE OUTSIDE THE BOX

With his autobiography out, Milind Soman, a man of many parts, talks about how his non-standard, multi-faceted life is really not worth writing home about

- Kunal Purandare

After one of his training sessions at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Swimming Pool in Dadar, Mumbai, Milind Soman—then a schoolboy— found a snake slithering on the road. Almost instinctively, he put it in his boots and took the reptile home. For the England-born Soman, who moved to Mumbai in 1973 at the age of eight, the company of animals was more comforting than interactions with people. “He was a loner and an extremely shy boy,” says his mother Usha, adding that her son had got cats, dogs, rabbits and turtles at their Shivaji Park residence.

His posh English and inability to fluently speak his mother tongue Marathi made Soman an outsider. “I was a misfit because I was a minority. I did a lot things that nobody else was doing. I didn’t know other people like me. And I never tried to fit in or have friends. I saw myself as being different because my interests were different. I had a lot of animals at home… I used to read a lot, and was swimming competitively,” says Soman, 54, after the March launch of his autobiography, Made in India: A Memoir, written with Roopa Pai.

National level-swimmer-turned-supermodel-turned-actor-turned-runner-turned-entrepreneur, Soman has worn multiple hats with aplomb. Yet, he believes his life is not worthy of a book because there is no struggle or obstacle that he had to overcome. “No, I am still not convinced that my life deserved a book,” he laughs. Publishers Penguin Random House India approached him with a proposal five years ago, but he declined as he had “forgotten most of his life anyway”.