India’s top talent scouts are looking for the Next Big Star. Is it you?

Things have changed since . Talent scouts now do all the dirty work of sifting through demo videos for entertainment companies, sports franchises, and studios. Scouts double up as managers and triple up as representatives. It’s a job that requires as much optimism as grit, as much patience as quick thinking, and needs focus on a singular talent and the world at large. See how new blood is changing the game.

On the lookout

Nisarg Naik is only 24. But already, aspiring cricketers know him as the man who can change their lives. He scouts all over the country,heading to wherever matches are being played. He says he’s watched over 150 matches so far. This sets him apart from older scouts, who mostly work remotely.

Naik also manages more than 20 players, including Uma Chetry, Kashvee Gautam, Shabnam Shakil and Aparna Mondal, and has recommended players for the Women’s Premier League. Last year, three of his finds participated in the Women’s World Cup; 13 played in the WPL.

“Getting discovered, and doing the discovering is all reference-based,” he says. And you’re only as good as your last pick. Naik recalls how he spotted Chetry at a local match in Assam two years ago. “She was aggressive, her fielding skills were good too. We didn’t have any Assamese players on the women’s team,” he says. “I signed her up in 2023; 10 days later, she got the call for the India team.” He also signed Gautam before the WPL. “She’s now the highest-value uncapped player, at ₹2 crore.”

One of his biggest flexes, though, is Niki Prasad, captain of the women’s U19 team. “Two years ago, when she wasn’t even on the India team, I tweeted that she would be captain in 2025.” says Naik. “That tweet crossed 50k likes, after she was announced as captain.”

Naik grew up in Mumbai, and started out as a net bowler for the IPL and a state probable for the U19 team. But he has realised that his skills lie more in scanning the pitch than playing on it. He can’t physically attend 15 matches in the same day, but he knows where to look. Naik uses Instagram to cross-reference scorecards on the BCCI’s domestic match updates. When he spots a rising star, he looks them up on Instagram to view them in action.

“Last May, I saw an Instagram video of Akshita Maheshwari bowling and was impressed. So, I connected with her,” he says. Then, at a match in Mumbai in November, he met the batting coach for the Mumbai Indians and told her about Maheshwari. A day later, the coach called back, asking for Akshita’s contact details. That very day, Akshita was invited for trials. MI were the only team to bid on the 24-year-old bowler at the December auction.

Naik’s already thinking ahead. He signs players with the most potential to the agency, Artist Assist, where he works. And he keeps a keen eye on fielding. “When scouts ask players for videos, they send ones where they’re hitting a six or taking a wicket. Fielding is not glamorous, but it’s where the grit shows.”

Searchlight on

Her business cards say CEO of Vishal Bhardwaj Films and now, Creative Producer at Sikhya Films. But Manpreet Bacchhar, 37, still freelances as a talent agent for film and TV, the way she’s been doing since 2012. This is hardly the career for someone who studied microbiology. She stumbled into it via jobs in event management, and after learning that her flatmate’s talent agency called Kwan (now Collective), had a vacancy and it was 15 minutes from their home in Andheri, Mumbai. Bacchhar got the job, and ended up managing the late Irrfan Khan, Vijay Varma, Wamiqa Gabbi, Tillottama Shome and Gulshan Devaiah.

There’s no recipe to spot the next screen star -- but there are two ingredients. “A scout can find someone bursting with talent at an audition, the way we found Anshumaan Pushkar and Wamiqa Gabbi. Or one can see potential and hone it well to create star quality, as we did with Vijay Varma, who came recommended by director Guneet Monga. We hustled on his behalf for two years. But I knew he was very, very good.”

Thirteen years in, she’s figured out that she does both well. “I’ve been a quick learner, I’ve been in the right rooms, and I give credit to people I’ve worked with,” she says. “But the job is a lot about instinct. I have it, mainly for spotting people from outside the industry.” These are the hopefuls who lack the resources and connections needed to stay visible should an opportunity come calling. “Of course a person must be talented and hardworking. But luck plays a role too.”

Luck is what led Bacchhar to Gabbi in 2019. They were casting for a TV adaptation of Midnight’s Children, which never got made. Gabbi had mostly worked in Punjabi cinema at the time. “We were smitten with how good she was at the audition,” Bacchar recalls. Bacchhar had quit talent management by then. “But once an agent, always an agent,” she says. She took over as co-manager for Gabbi, chalking out a career path, helping her pick films, positioning her as a fierce talent, hustling for top dollar. Few knew of Gabbi before the pandemic. Now, she’s got films in Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi in the pipeline.

The lines may have blurred between the roles of talent scout and artist manager but on the whole, the entertainment business is now better organised. There are casting companies, a network of scouts, agents to hustle and managers to push careers upward. But Bacchhar notes that a talent manager can only take an actor so far. “Finding talent and working with them is such an intimate relationship. If I don’t see the hunger, if I get a sense of laziness, if there’s no interest in working on your craft. I can only bring you the opportunities, talk about you, and put you in the rooms. But in front of the camera, it’s all you.”

Field vision

For Prajval VC, moving from sports talent scout to performance analyst for the national football team in July 2024 was an easy decision. “Paying attention to your players and your team goes hand-in-hand with scouting,” says the 26-year-old from Bengaluru.

Since he started, the number of agents has shot up, and clubs are getting more and more dependent on them. A key skill every scout needs: to champion a promising player even before the big wins. In 2023, when coaches and management weren’t keen on footballer Muhammad Asif, Prajval spent extra hours, extra days, convincing them that he was worth it. It paid off. Asif is now midfielder on the India team.

The job, he says, also requires him to be optimistic every single day – you never know where talent is hiding and what will surprise you. Become jaded early and you risk overlooking a gem. “You can never have a 100% success rate,” says Prajval. “You could recruit someone and he may not turn out to be how you thought he would. That doesn’t mean he’s a bad player. It’s just how we all learn.”

Hearing aid

Tarsame Mittal, 41, who started out as an artist coordinator and event manager in 2004 and founded TM Talent Management in 2012, knows that scouts have an often thankless job. They’re recognised for that one discovery, not the 100 maybes they spent time analysing. His first big find was singer, Zubeen Garg, the top-selling artist in Assam. He’s signed and managed more than 60 artists, including Arijit Singh, Sunidhi Chauhan, Vishal & Shekhar, Rekha Bhardwaj, Badshah and Amit Trivedi.

Mittal signed the majority of his artists before social media took over our minds. “We use social media to amplify our artists, not find new ones,” he says. Even though almost everybody heads to Spotify, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube to look for the next new voice, he knows that theres a real world out there, with real talent in it. “If there is a classical music singer doing riyaaz outside of the Reels, it doesn’t make him any less talented,” he says. “One thousand songs release every day in India. But only 10 or 20 songs become hits in a whole year. Our job is to find them.”

Luckily, talent-hunting in Indian music isn’t a bloody operation. “We’re too far away from saturation,” explains Mittal. “If there are 1,00,000 artists in India and 1,000 of them are popular, no more than 200 of them are professionally managed. And 500 of them became popular before social media.” he says.

But things are moving fast in music, he says. “The number of artist managers is going to increase manifold, because there is talent and there is business.” As in cinema, it’s usually trustworthy familiars (parents, spouses, family, friends) who become managers. “Being a manager isn’t rocket science. You need to understand your client’s skills and vision and match it to the opportunities in the market, and do it over and over again,” he points out. But being a great manager needs more. “They’d have to be experts in law, finance, management, marketing and sales. It’s like running a business.”

From HT Brunch, January 25, 2025

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