Being Priyanka Chopra

Priyanka Chopra is working effortlessly on her high-profile American television debut in Joshua Safran’s “Quantico”

Days back I spoke to Priyanka Chopra, who’s been in Montreal, working effortlessly on her high-profile American television debut in Joshua Safran’s “Quantico”. In times when a fistful of Indian artistes have managed only supporting roles in international films and television series, or at best, adorned the billboards on Cannes’ manicured Croisette for endorsing international beauty brands, PC (as we fondly call her) has successfully bagged the lead in a television series (for a well-known network, ABC) whose posters are plastered across prime positions in New York and Los Angeles. No mean feat that!

She plays Alex Parrish, a new FBI recruit who’s barely set foot at HQ before she’s arrested on suspicion of treason. When we spoke, PC was making the most of some scarce down-time before embarking on whirlwind promotions for the keenly anticipated Homeland-meets-Grey’s Anatomy drama, launching on September 27.

PC has been in Bollywood for 14 years, which is as long as I’ve been behind the scenes. Just when one would think that having ostensibly surpassed the slim shelf life of a successful Hindi film heroine, she would hang up her high-heeled Louboutins and marry a handsome billionaire, she debunks the myth, sleeping only a few hours a day and oscillating between two careers in two continents. I don’t know how many desi girls can boast of cutting international singles, launching a production company, featuring in at least two celebrated Bollywood films a year despite an influx of new faces, and taking a stab at a mainstream acting career that’s seemingly looking north.

I’ve known PC for long, though we meet sporadically because she’s invariably shooting or on a long-haul flight like a self-confessed nomad. We’re in the same industry, we have common friends, we’re on each other’s BBMs and we follow each other on Twitter. So it’s never hard knowing where she is or what she is up to. Solitude is not a luxury she can enjoy (or wants to). The brunette beauty is akin to a John Grisham novel; engaging, un-putdownable, hotter than the tropics. Driven by fierce ambition and yet one with a remarkable zest for life, PC has a game plan, which, I suspect, is hidden away even from God. But deep down, our desi pride is Daddy’s Little Girl, and the tattoo on her right hand bears testimony to that. 

Tailpieces

1) Back in 2010, Victoria Beckham had piously declared that she was banning painfully thin models from her catwalk shows. So just when you’d expect happy plus-size models at her recent show in New York, a slew of unhealthily skinny models walked down the runway looking famished and grumpy. Was it Beckham’s way of bringing attention to world hunger? All right jokes aside, the girls resembled motorised skeletons, and positively tortured to be wearing her clothes, as they were by starving.

2) Pemra has banned an “immoral” condom advertisement for “excessive vulgarity”. If this doesn’t smack of hypocrisy, what does? Why can’t a condom commercial try to hit home by being a bit naughty and risque? Why does everything have to be cloaked in false seriousness? Have people lost their sense of humour? Or is it yet another case of trying to be holier-than-thou in public while doing everything irreligious behind closed doors? The ban is as concerning and preposterous as is the fact that over one-third of Pakistan has no access to contraception even though its population, particularly in villages and small towns, is exploding at an alarming rate. Matters related to family planning are still taboo topics of discussion. It’s funny that people find such ads irreligious but feel that it is all right for an impoverished nation to reproduce at breakneck speed.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 17^th,  2015.

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