TRAVELLING COMPANIONS

I travelled with Deepika Padukone today. As I was coming to work, I sat alongside a smiling Deepika, all demure-pretty with a clip in her hair and a sunny yellow dress, posing against an impossibly-blue sky and a fairy-tale cottage with a riot of flowers in the garden.

Surprised? Don't be. Ever since I came to Mumbai, I have travelled with the likes of a fresh-faced Salman Khan (with long-hair, cute-smile and his shirt-on, looking like he did in his Hum Aapke Hai Kaun days). And with Amitabh Bachchan, when he was still a beardless and helmet-haired angry-young-man with an intense gaze and a sneer on his rouged lips. And a cherubic-fresh Preity Zinta, or an angelic-vacuous Aishwarya - often dimpling down at me or gazing down at me from both sides. Or sometimes a Shah Rukh Khan from his floppy-haired, puppy-eyed days, who looks ready to break into a K-k-k-kiran every time the vehicle stutters in a traffic jam.

No, I don't travel in a Merc. I travel in auto-rickshaws. And one of the greatest amusements is to find whose image will be there on the inner walls of the rickshaw when I climb in. Glossy, glamourous and larger-than-life travelling companions I can look at when the rickshaw is stuck in a traffic jam.

And imagine myself in the company of stars. After all, Mumbai is the City of Dreams, and a little bit of tinsel gets rubbed off on me even when I am caught in the middle of suburban roads and daily chaos.

Unfortunately, all auto-rickshaws do not have Bollywood stars as interior decoration. Some have lights and blasting sound-boxes, some have shabby velvet and some have shiny rexine. But, for me, the shine is missing from a rickshaw-ride if I don't have a brooding Amitabh by my side. Or a rosy-cheeked Aamir. Or a twinkling Juhi Chawla.

I'm not choosy. Just celebrity-struck when I'm traffic-stuck.

FREIDA PINTO - MY (UN)FAIR LADY?

Poor Freida Pinto. While whooping it up at various parties all the world over in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire's super success, our poor little girl in the limelight has been hounded by bad press.

Apparently, in her baby steps up the fame-and-fortune ladder, she has been stepping on a lot of touchy toes. There was the ditching of former fiance/husband Rohan Antao (gleefully played up by the media, with photos of a mopey Antao wishing her all the best). There was the snubbing of Wendell Rodricks, the Goan designer who gave darling Freida her first break in modelling. Wendell makes delicious free-flowing gowns which can grace the red carpet as well as any other. Instead, 'international' Freida is opting for Dries Van Notens and Gallianos galore (the blue net gown at the Oscars got a very mixed reaction).
And there is the simpering smiles and cosying up to the eligible Dev Patel, a budding romance which seems constructed only for the cameras.

All this rankles. Latika (her character in SDM) was a woman who was forced to compromise, yet who always rememebered her past loves and loyalties. Freida's press-created avatar comes across as a girl who chose to compromise, and who has willingly and quickly forgotten her past - loves and loyalties included.

There seems to be a moral which is being subtly created and reinforced - the glamour of the West (Hollywood, etc) turning the head of the gullible Indian girl and making her forget her tradition and culture.

Maybe I am being over-critical, maybe Freida is really a manipulative-miss-on-the-make, but then we have never really come across a clarification from her, have we? And it is so easy for self-righteous guardians of Indian values to point fingers and say, "See, what a slum-bitch she is." I can recall a similar anti-Aishwarya Rai campaign in the press when she tried to make her mark in Hollywood. Maybe India likes to keep its heroines under a metaphorical purdah - at home in Bollywood, rather than creating a flutter abroad?