Chitrangda Singh: The Rule Breaker

Chitrangda Singh is not a kitchen goddess, she’s not been delivering back to back hits, she is married with a kid...but for some god strange reason she is still one of FHM’s most lusted-after cover girls. And Honey Singh’s latest muse.

The last time Mrs Singh made it to the FHM cover, a cinema hack had been penning newsprint equivalent of letters written in blood taking her career choices as personal setbacks. This time, Honey Singh is penning Punjabi-rap/pop songs serenading her eyes – he’s changed their colour to blue to avoid being too accurate (arguably). “I’d like to see it as a compliment, I mean he makes good music, but why is it called Blue Eyes, I don’t have blue eyes,” she laughs. “I actually went and heard the whole song and the woman he is describing is nothing like me.” She should take it as a compliment that the song has managed to net 8.1 million hits on YouTube in the last two weeks. So what about Mrs Singh drives men borderline insane – despite her marriage of 12 years and a kid of five years? It’s definitely not the Mrs Robinson syndrome because she is nowhere even close to being there. Except maybe the saucy, tanned to perfection bit. Mrs Singh is now in the best shape of her life and far from averse to showing it off. For a country that’s fancied married women but never publically admitted it, Chitrangda has been a blatant, in-your-face exception. Plus, she has a strange knack of being current – the latest following the molestation charges against Tarun Tejpal, which her movie Inqaar has become the go-to cinematic reference for. The country, or at least the hacks have been constantly questioning her about whether she is still married, almost like they are sort of disappointed. She has reciprocated by imagining smacking them in the nose and at other times looking at her own self in third person while answering marital status related questions. “Don’t worry I am not thinking about smacking you…” And that’s the thing about Chitrangda – she is fun and sexy but there is something slightly intimidating about her. At a lot of levels, she is exactly like the role she played in Desi Boyz – a hottie professor. Only she’s not playing a role, she’s living it everyday. In the last year, she’s had just two movies out – I, Me aur Main and Inkaar, both were average to below average performers at the box office. Had it been anyone else, the audiences would have written them off, but she’s enjoyed a rather long rope. Her next movie with another man she is obsessively asked about (Sudhir Mishra) is Mehrunissa and it has gotten delayed, due to which she’s suddenly hopping between towns telling people in one town to get fit for Puma, launching a tablet in the next and going to another to launch lady razors for Gillette.

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But something somewhere has changed, Chitrangda is suddenly, to put it mildly, a little more mainstream than she was before. But when it comes to things like this shoot, we don’t really mind. “I’m not sexually as bold as the pictures… I’d never be seen in clothes like the ones I wore for the FHM shoot,” she laughs. True, she’s more of a jeans and t-shirt kind of a gal, plus she’d probably also not let people picture her in the loo either, but that’s beside the point. She’s not addicted to selfies either, which means unlike her compatriots she doesn’t use the loo for the real purposes it was intended for.

She likes shoots though, she tells us, because they let her be “things she’s not”. And what’s the kind of a girl she is? “Actually shouldn’t you be telling me what sort of a girl I am? It’s our second cover, you should have learnt something by now,” she purses her lips and fake admonishes. “I think I’m a little traditional, conservative, inhibited… I have to talk myself into doing sexy pictures or scenes in movies,” she explains, and somewhere in there she also confesses to finding “women who are bold, but in an inhibited, not in the face kind of a way” “very attractive.” It’s of course another matter that her chosen field understands sexual subtlety as much as Sunny Leone. And it’s not like she hasn’t dabbled her toes in it, she tried it with an item song in Joker and then in Desi Boyz, but she seems done with it, at least for now. “I’d have to think really really hard to do an item song again,” she confesses. Her brand of sexuality is closer to Inqaar than Desi Boyz. This of course is a matter of national shame, considering between her washboard stomach, her shaped derriere and the cascading tresses, she is in the best shape of her life right now. “I have grown up being obsessed with Shaolin movies, so when I was told of a trainer who’d been to the Shaolin temple, I jumped.” She continues to be obsessed with Kickboxing and Muay Thai, practicing them at least twice a week. It’s tough of course, between constantly hopping from Mumbai to Delhi, but she is managing, even though she confesses sometimes it gets “disorienting”. “Don’t worry, I deal with being disoriented quite well.” We ask her if she wants to take a break, go to a beach, grab a cocktail and settle for as much sexual subtlety as a bikini provides and she laughs. “Actually with Mehrunissa being delayed, it already feels like a vacation…I just want to get back to work.” Even New Years Eve is going to be spent at home catching up with family. Plus of course, Indians stare too much at women in bikinis right? “Maybe because they haven’t seen too many girls in bikinis, it’s almost like how people in villages react to seeing women in jeans…”

Her favourite beach holiday was in Bali last year, when she went scuba diving, cycled, walked, drank some good wine at a new shack every night and just vegetated in a bikini. “It was almost out of Eat, Pray, Love,” she confesses. Minus the picking up a younger lover bit, of course. In case you read that and said – aha, you’ve finally figured out a way in with her by showing-off your intricate knowledge of chick-lit in varying degrees of being transformed into cinema – you’d be wrong. “I couldn’t even get halfway through 50 Shades of Gray,” she says culling any and all BDSM related conversation. It’s not like you’d go through with it with her anyways, but yeah nothing bad ever came out of pretending. She’s a Dan Brown fan though, she says offering up an olive branch – “I’ve got Inferno on my bedside and just not started it yet…it’s a really fat one. I like books that are part fact and part fiction.”

Somehow the conversation drifts to crazy fans, she doesn’t have too many, it’s just the usual blocking cellphone numbers by the 100s on Whatsapp and boys constantly hanging outside her apartment in Mumbai. No letters in blood though, not yet anyway.

By then she’s moved on, she’s talking, or rather complaining about not having found the time to download any TV shows. She has a long list – “Why don’t you do it?” We promise we will, as long as she lets us add our recommendations to the mix – which of course means Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Suits and the Holy Grail – Californication. As remuneration, she offers a salad. “I can do dips, salads, maybe a grilled fish?” she offers. “You’d laugh if I told you what all I can cook.” She’s right, we do laugh. But we don’t really mind. There’s something about Chitrangda that makes her sex appeal a constant beer time conversation, independent of her lack of cooking prowess, her cinematic choices, her marital status or even her item songs. And for some strange inexplicable reason, we really do love her.

From the December 2013 issue of FHM India.