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Balle Balle in Delhi with Gurinder Chadha
"Indians should thank NRIs for keeping Indian tradition alive abroad," she proclaims in a talk with Vijaya Sharma.
Television promotionals in India these days are replete with the colourful scenes from the latest Gurinder Chadha offering, Bride and Prejudice.
It's Bollywood kitsch through and through, with the screen exploding in a burst of orange, pinks and reds with Aishwarya and friends breaking into a song and dance oh so often much to the bewilderment of the firang Martin Henderson (come to India in search of a bride), who seems to be much taken by Aishwarya when he sees her for the first time and steals glances at her at the wedding do.
The Hindi version is then aptly titled Balle Balle from Amritsar to LA. It captures the feisty spirit of the film, perfectly.
Gurinder Chadha was in Delhi to promote the film and had a field day posing for the shutterbugs
in her suite in Delhi's posh Le Meridien Hotel, with one cameraman calling out, "Madam, look straight please", while the other wanted her to look to the left and Gurinder did her best, perched on the small wooden projection at one end of her hotel room, looking bright and fresh.
Next there were a slew of reporters waiting and one fidgety old gent from a daily, impatient with the photographers taking forever with their left and right, called out: "Madam, come and talk to us."
Talk she did, together with her husband Paul Mayeda Berges. Replying to a query from HindustanTimes.com on whether the huge success of her film Bend It Like Beckham (BILB) in the UK and the US has made her more acceptable as a British Asian director in the western world and also made it easier for her to access stars from the west, Chadha said that the success of BILB has made things smooth for her in many ways, primarily in terms of gaining finance for her films.
It was tough earlier to secure finance, she said. But when BILB, with a then little-known Asian actress Parminder Nagra, made it big in the UK and even the US and is now counted not as an Asian film but as among the most successful British films in recent times, more doors have opened.
