Of big shoes and small feet: Soha Ali Khan opens up about film, family and fame

With projects like Khoya Khoya Chand, Rang De Basanti, Tum Mile and Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns in her filmography, Soha, 39, may not have been hugely successful as an actor, but asserts she has carved her own identity.

“She’s woken up,” Soha Ali Khan exclaimed before she hung up to attend to her newfound world of motherhood. Happy balancing it with what she calls her “moderately famous” public life, she says she always knew she had “impossibly large shoes to fill” with her “small feet”.

Soha Ali Khan talks about the bond she shares with Saif.

As the youngest daughter of a cricket legend like Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi and Bollywood veteran Sharmila Tagore, sister of actor Saif Ali Khan and sister-in-law of actor Kareena Kapoor Khan, Soha often had a thought or two about “not really being in that league but not being entirely anonymous”.

In her debut book The Perils of Being Moderately Famous, she has opened up about it all. “Writing a personal memoir like this was very interesting for me as I’ve talked about things like working in an industry like this (Bollywood), being compared to my mother or my brother, why I chose to get into films, what it’s like to be me, to belong to a family of superstars, not really be in that league but not to be entirely anonymous... How people know who you are but they really know who you are because of who you are related to. It has a frustrating side to it, and then you can even laugh at it and embrace it as an identity. I think I’ve tried to do the latter,” Soha, a royal princess and actor in her own right, told IANS over phone from Mumbai.

She hopes her debut book, published by Penguin India, will clear up people’s misconceptions about her. “When most people meet me, they are surprised by who I am. I think people have a lot of pre-conceptions about what it’s like to belong to a family like mine and how it’s like to have a royal tag and be a princess, to be an actress... I thought maybe when I write the book in a funny way, one could clear up those misconceptions.”

Her childhood, she says, was also “ordinary” -- unlike what many would like to believe. “I am the youngest in the family, so by the time I was born, my mother wasn’t working in films so much, my father had retired from professional cricket. So, Amma and Appa would come for parent-teacher meetings, and my father helped me in completing my essays for college, filled out my visa application forms. “We lived in Delhi, not Mumbai... So they were always ordinary parents.”

Being just that -- an ordinary parent -- herself is something Soha is currently enjoying. “She has woken up,” Soha said of her and husband Kunal Kemmu’s daughter Inaaya Naumi Kemmu, who was born on September 29.

Returning to the call a few minutes after hanging up, Soha had a hearty laugh over how “the baby controls everything now”. “I am such a control freak myself, so it’s really odd to be not in control of when I eat, how much I sleep, if I can go to the gym now,” she said, adding how her mind is constantly with her little one.