Tom Alter

Tom Alter, the son and grandson of American Presbyterian missionaries who first came to India in 1916, grew up in north India in the towns of Rajpur and Mussoorie, and studied at Woodstock School. It was while teaching at a school in Jagadhri, Haryana in the early 1970s that Alter picked honed his Hindi and fell in love with the movies, in specific Indian cinema. In that era television was not common in India and so most people went to the movies, often several times a week. Alter was enamored by the films and in June 1972, after noticing a small classified ad in the newspaper, he enrolled at the prestigious prestigious Film and Television Institute of India of Pune. Alter was one of two people selected out of more than 1000 applicants that year and he learned his craft at the FTII, where he studied with the likes of Benjamin Gilani, Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Mithun Chakraborthy and others. After graduating from FTII, Alter headed straight to Bombay and soon got his first break