Hancock Prospecting CEO of Projects Sanjiv Manchanda balances mining executive role with treading the boards

Dinner with family friends seven years ago reacquainted Sanjiv Manchanda with a passion for performing he thought was long behind him.

Active in drama during his school days growing up in Delhi, Manchanda had pursued amateur theatre while studying electrical engineering at university, treading the boards with his future wife Bindiya.

Performing went to the wayside as his career progressed, the couple moving to Perth in 1990 where Manchanda joined the mining sector and has worked for Hancock Prospecting for the past 15 years.

His current role as CEO of Projects at Hancock Prospecting has Manchanda overseeing multi-billion-dollar projects with feasibility studies, exploration, engineering, construction and commissioning.

So, when family friend and director Biswajit Munshi shared at dinner that fateful night how one of his actors had just left mid-production, and he was looking for a replacement, Bindiya suggested her husband step in.

“She dobbed me into our family friends,” 62-year-old Manchanda recounts.

“She said it would give me a nice break from my hectic work. I think I was building Roy Hill at the time, and I was busy, and she said, ‘It’ll just be something to take your mind away from work’.”

Assured it was only a small role, Manchanda agreed to give it a go and impressed Munshi to the extent that the director had been on a mission ever since to find a play where he could cast the mining executive in the lead role.

Munshi found it in English comedy Rafta, Rafta… adapted by Ayub Khan-Din from Bill Naughton’s 1963 play All In Good Time, relocating Naughton’s working-class world into the heart of a migrant Indian family, where a young newlywed couple must deal with the comedy and chaos of meddling family members.

Manchanda played the father, Eeshwar, in the August sold-out season presented by Encore Productions WA at Murdoch University’s Nexus Theatre, with Bindiya also taking to the stage on this occasion in the role of Molly.

“I loved the character and I loved the script,” the Mosman Park doting grandfather says.

“The thing I enjoyed about it again, when you’re doing it, you just forget everything else. You immerse yourself in a different world and a different character, and it’s just a nice, good stress-reliever. You forget your normal day-to-day world, and for two hours you’re living someone else’s life.

“I also play golf. I’m not a very good golfer but it’s another stress reliever, just like spending time with the grandkids. It’s just a different world where you get to be a child with them.”

Manchanda accommodated rehearsals around his day-to-day commitments, from late-night script readings over conference call to weekend run-throughs every Saturday and Sunday.

“In between, I did have some business travel, and I’d be an apology, but we rehearsed for eight to nine months just to make sure that we could get enough time where everyone was there,” he says.

“I was reading the script on the plane. I would read my parts of the script and create audio files with it and put it on a playlist on my phone, so when driving in the car, I had the playlist playing, listening to my dialogue and memorising it.”

While Manchanda says he might take some time before launching into his next theatrical experience, he knows it would have to be another comedy.

“My view of entertainment and turning off is not to go into another world full of sorrows,” he adds.

“It’s to have fun and laughter. You’ve got to take life a bit lightly.”