 In 2014, he was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour in performing arts in India.Born to a 9th generation Telugu Brahmin migrant family in Parwa village in Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, at the age of four he had to leave his parents and leave a city where he grew up a lonely child and hardly interested in studies, and raised outside of Indian urban centres.As films and theatre were taboo in his family, he saw his first play when he moved to Nagpur for his matriculation.