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Kolkata calling for Bipasha
Bipasha Basu flies to her home town to shoot for her first Bengali film with director Rituparno Ghosh. Ritujaay Ghosh speaks to the actress.
She may be a Bengali bombshell but she wasn’t in hot pants and a tank top or a tight Tee and tighter jeans for her first interaction with the media in Kolkata on Sunday.
Bipasha Basu was demurely draped in a sari with a bindi on her forehead and plenty of chunky silver jewellery. The look fit in perfectly with the title of Rituparno Ghosh’s Sob Charitro Kalponik( All Characters Imaginary).
“When my father saw me in a sari he was in a state of shock,” she says. “He wanted to know what had happened to my shorts. He’s never seen his Bonny dressed like this before.”
First attempt
In her first Bengali film Basu plays a Non-Resident- Bengali who comes to Kolkata in search of her roots. Prosenjit, Jishu Sengupta, Sohag Sen and Pauli Damare her co-actors.
“I can identify with my character completely,” she asserts. “Radhika comes back to Kolkata after the loss of her husband and uses his poems to connect and find herself. Joy Goswami has written the poems especially for the film.”
Being in the City of Joy has made her nostalgic. She’s been thinking about Bengali food and old buddies.
Her Bengali is rusty. “I hardly get a chance to speak Bengali in Mumbai except when I’m with my parents,” she rues.
Basu says that she’s been giving John Abraham lessons. “He tried speaking a few lines in Bangla recently during the promotional tour of
Goal ,” she smiles.
Ghosh admits that there are a few syntactical errors in her diction but he overlooks them. “It goes with her character,” Ghosh explains. His leading lady is completely at home on the sets. She’s even made a new friend, Pauli, and induced her to join a gym to keep in shape.
