SANGEETA WADDHWANI REVISITS THE VIVACIOUS, LIFE POSITIVE, PRO GLAM, NEW MONEYED PROFILE OF THE ACTRESS IN LIEU OF THIS NEW SKELETON..
Years ago I had met Shilpa Shetty at a brunch in a sea facing restaurant in SOBO and found her to be in career limbo (no Big Brother had happened yet and no Raj Kundra either). But she was fun, approachable, hopeful….AND helpful. I told her I had admired her no make-up, very close-to-reality portrayal of an advertising executive in a film about AIDS… where her character gets AIDS from a past love and then had to live through stigmas, boycotts at work, and all other kinds of hell. A film called Phir Milenge, made by a woman, Revathi, which for the first time made me see Shilpa Shetty as an actor of calibre, not just eye candy.
We chatted later on the phone about the behind the scenes dynamics of Bollywood…even touched upon the proverbial casting couch. Her response was that it exists in every industry..but yes, when a few women bring that game into play to rise in their careers, they bring the bar to that level for all their competitors. This conversation at that time was, was for my novel, Bollywood on the Bend.
At that point , Shilpa had shared that she was quite resigned to hanging up her chamak challo gear and was ok to be remembered as that actress who did cool item numbers!
Things changed of course when Shilpa entered the Big Brother Reality TV show in January 2007…the year HELLO! magazine launched in India.
It proved to be a trial…a cross-cultural war zone.. and a transformational event. For close to a month Shilpa tolerated a bunch of crude rascist bigots on the Big Brother show in the UK..winning that season with a handsome prize of 100,000 GBP….and seeing her celebrity quotient sky rocket! She shook hands with the Queen (whose brood in more recent times also proved to be bigoted when one member questioned what the colour of Meghan Markle’s son would be…ironies never cease.)
Shilpa… whose life until then was so devoid of momentum…(I remember her manager then, Dale Bhatnagar, proposing a cover when I was at L’Officiel and all of us turning it down)…well after Big Brother…HELLO! UK flew down to Mumbai to capture her at her maiden home in suburban Mumbai with her extensive Ganpathy statue collection. This was circa 2007. It was a lovely shoot. The smart Shetty had billed herself to be as popular as Aishwarya Rai in India…and the foreign press was lapping it up. Well the media couldn’t care less about who she was in India… she had been acknowledged by the Queen!
The lesson one can take from Shilpa’s journey, is that you may sometimes lose hope when your work trajectory comes to a halt…but you should never give up on yourself. Shilpa took care of herself to a point of religiosity… she still does.
When she conquered the trashy reality TV housemates in Big Brother, she was well turned out, fit and even tried winning over her TV housemates by cooking for them. They kept sarcastically calling her ‘the Bollywood Princess’.and worse, the late Jade Goody told her ‘you smell like a curry’…
After her trial by TV….and her incredible transcendental triumph, Shilpa Shetty was hitting covers with the moniker EXCLUSIVE all over. Her time had come.
Her Prince Charming…suitably christened Raj..also entered her life around that time. They met presumably as he was to promote her eponymous perfume in the UK.
There was a beautiful shaadi to follow, many more personal milestones..but yes…she was very vocal in those early magazine stories about her desire for a weighty diamond at the time Raj proposed to her. In an interview with Shibani Dandekar, for the show Love, Laugh and Live Show, she talked of the special ‘lunch’ that Raj invited her to, in London, pulling out his proposal ring when dessert arrived. “It was a five-carat diamond ring and I might sound really materialistic but I was like, ‘It’s just five carats.’ I took a while to say yes because I was like, ‘This is not what I imagined.’ No, no, I am just joking. Because I took two seconds more, he was like, ‘The wedding ring will be bigger.’ Raj clearly delivered on his promise, a 20 carat diamond ring which Shilpa has stated, will go to her future daughter-in-law ‘if she treats me well.’
With the status of a reality TV Conquistador, I heard of a change in the lady’s attitude. “Shilpa will only talk to you if you have money,” was the new social verdict. It didn’t sound very palatable. It sounded New Money.
And one sensed it. We did a wonderful exclusive when her son Viaan had turned one, for HELLO! He was adorable. Shilpa kept us waiting for nearly half a day and then didn’t appear to be seeing people as individuals with histories and identities anymore. She didn’t seem to recollect our past conversations with any gravitas but gushed over a baubly socialite we bumped into. Yes it was a palpable attitude shift. This version of Shilpa I would not have called for a casual research chat for a book. This was a full fledged celebrity and through her lens, everything now had to do with ‘bigness’.
Can I be blunt? This new hauteur wasn’t very attractive. But then that is ironically why – leaving their propensity for rascism aside – British social values seem far more evolved to me. My dear friend and fellow journalist Naomi Canton explained them to me over a Starbucks coffee in London. “The British will value you based on how you treat people, not your branded bags and personal effects!” She said you will only see new moneyed tourists flocking to Harrods and Selfridges which the truly old moneyed Brits find highly amusing. The Brits want to know your family, your educational background and look at your core values and ethics. Your conduct, use of language. THAT to them, is class.
Raj Kundra had the non-Bolly vibe for the brief time we interacted at the shoot. ..he seemed to be a friendly sort…very down-to- earth…no drama. I know Shilpa had a very high opinion of his ability to drive ever new ventures to fruition, as she shared this in one of our earlier interactions. The story she loved is how he had made a business exporting pashmina shawls from India to Britain. Now that we know a LOT more about those early ventures, which allegedly include money laundering deals…we wonder how that sat with Shilpa, who religiously walked to the Siddhi Vinayak temple every Tuesday? When you take that skill for financial (mis)adventure into creating pornography, where aspiring talent is NOT being told clearly that they are mere props for adult content, and that this is hardly going to tap into their thespian dreams or talent, you are suddenly pushing MANY other moral and ethical buttons…in many ways going full circle…for Shilpa too had walked the path of a ‘struggler’ from a middle class business family. How would she have liked to find herself, a vulnerable ‘Bollywould’ stripping for a lascivious lens eye, with the false notion that this would be her route to fame and riches?
The Pandemic has blown so much cover off new moneyed Bollywood’s darker shades. Drug cartels, drug parties, nepotism…the much-speculated murder of Sushant Singh Rajput who at last intercepted message had made it clear he wanted to quit Bollywood and go back to farming…(how many crores has the perpetrator spent to cover his tracks?)
And though I had been told by another dear friend that the porn trade is another massive undercurrent…it has only come to light now. In all my readings of Indian spiritual literature, one key takeaway is that wealth is feminine. She is whimsical. She ebbs and flows. She is a goddess. You can’t exploit devis and earn a devi’s blessings.
What’s more, reality TV pays very well and Shilpa has been quite the ‘Superrrrr se Uparrrr’ star of these shows. There was no need to get into businesses that compromise your values. I remember a press release sent out by her PR when she was ready to return to the small screen that she had signed a deal that went into crores to be a reality show judge. The Pandemic may have seen more realistic payouts…but wouldn’t you agree…the Kundras as a family had everything..and more! A stable and loving marriage, two lovely kids and a sprawling, palatial residence with a recreational area, a private gazebo, a private paradise…perhaps this episode in their lives is best called Daag. A slow, eerie stain spreads…picture abhi baaki hai..
A snapshot with the one year old Viaan Raj Kundra from a HELLO! cover story from 2013…Viaan was the first celebrity baby to ever appear on our cover!
LIFE OF A MAGAZINE EDITOR 