The story of Dev Raturi, a 46-year-old man from a village in Uttarakhand’s Tehri Garhwal district reads like a Bollywood rags-to-riches story. The Std. XII dropout is a diehard Bruce Lee fan who wanted to follow in the footsteps of his idol. But his dreams were shattered when he was rejected in a Bollywood film audition in 1998. Little did he know then that he would one day make a mark in the Chinese film industry and that his name would find mention in school textbooks in Xi’an city in Shanxi Province of China.
Eighteen years after he reached China to work as a waiter in a restaurant in Shenzhen, Dev is a respected as well as recognised face because he has acted in more than 35 Chinese films and TV serials.
Dev Raturi did menial jobs in Delhi for a decade before he managed to get a job as a waiter in an Indian restaurant in China in 2005. He simultaneously trained in martial arts for seven years. In the process, he rose to the rank of a manager at a high-end restaurant. In 2013, he opened his own restaurant — Red Fort — in Xi’an.
Raturi luckily met a film director who had come to eat at his place one day in 2017. He bagged a small role in a TV serial, SWAT. It did well and Dev’s career as an actor started. Today, besides being an actor, he is also the owner of eight restaurants in China where he lives with his wife and two sons.
Raturi has taken around 150 unemployed men from his village to China. Out of his total staff of 70, around 40 are from Uttarakhand.