Kajal Agarwal: Don’t Let The Net And Singham Fool You

Kajal Agarwal played Aishwarya Rai’s friend in Kyun! Ho Gaya Na… way back when in 2004. A lot has changed in the last seven years. America has fought wars with Iraq and Afghanistan. India has crashed appallingly out of one world cup and won the other. The world has gone through two recessions, FHM through two managements and three editors and Mumbai has survived three terror strikes. Bollywood has fallen in love with remakes from down south and Kajal Agarwal has gone from being Aishwarya Rai's friend in KHGN to playing the lead in the second biggest hit of the year – Singham. Her co-star Ms Rai in the meantime is now the Bachchan Bahu, has a Bachchan bun in the oven and is suing a film star.

Over the last 7 years when she seemingly disappeared from Mumbai, she’s gone out and done close to two dozen box office ringers south of the border (you wouldn’t know, because most of us still only pretend to know about cinema from down south), been nominated for two Filmfare awards and delivered the biggest Telugu hit of all time – Magadheera. She also got 5,000 Twitter followers over a span of one single evening and is now rumoured to be doing a movie opposite Ms Rai’s husband called Businessman, which will be a remake of a Telugu movie she will also be starring in.

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The one thing that has not changed though – are her airs. Miss Agarwal seems to be strangely lacking in any. She lacks even the regulation ‘I live in town’ air that makes all South Mumbai citizens walk in slow motion surveying the ‘urbs’. Miss Agarwal has grown up a proud South Mumbai citizen, her fondest memories are that of the fair at the CCI (Cricket Club of India) and eating cotton candy she tells us at the shoot, when we hand her a box. It’s two boxes actually and not on a stick as she used to like, but she gets by.

All cute girls now wear glasses. Miss Agarwal does too. Purple ones, though we think she’d look even cuter in a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. She has one of those at home she tells us. Aha!

Miss Agarwal instantly puts you at ease and makes you want to kid around with her. So while she’s getting her makeup done, we make a quick side bet – 500 bucks with a friend of the photographer, on the fact that we think she arrived n a white ribbed vest – we were apparently too distracted to notice. She didn’t and we’re out 500 bucks. But we aren’t complaining. Two hours prior, she had arrived for the shoot in a pair of faded blue jeans and a white tee, both of which fit her like a glove.

Google her, pop into the images tab and you’ll see a girl whose pictures don’t do her justice. Her movie Singham doesn’t either. Between the (now rechristened) Ajay Devgn ripping off his shirt in every alternate frame and jhaaping bad guys (minus Chulbul Pandey’s sense of humour and catch phrases), Miss Agarwal seems to be just a little lost – she’s the hero’s girlfriend, and she calls it, “yet another male dominated story”.

Truth be told, it’s tough to talk about her without using a cliché – if we were not FHM or had not gone to journalism school we would have described her as “cute and bubbly” or “chirpy”. But since it is FHM and we did go to journalism school and own a well-worn copy of Wren & Martin as well as a well-used thesaurus, we’d just say there is something about her that makes you want to ask her out for a drink. Not for a four-course wine dinner where you’d wear a suit, sit across the table from her, smile and repeat time-perfected stories and laugh without unleashing the hyena hiding inside you. Nopes, you want to take her out for a beer to a regular place, nothing too fancy. And then maybe follow thar up with a parantha or anda pao at three in the morning. It’s then that you see the huge rock on her finger and you want to get that drink even more.

We, being as we are, ask her to take the ring off for the shoot and then inquire if she’s taken. She laughs. “You’ve got the hand wrong,” she says and then adds, “The ring finger is on the right hand”. And that’s followed by one of those ringing laughs – the kind that you can get used to. We mumble something about it being a common male mistake and move on.

She’s (thankfully!) not the kind to order a grilled chicken salad without dressing and scrounge on the croutons. She’s hooked onto Hyderabadi fare – biryani, haleem – you know, the usual. We surge ahead with the intention of asking her more about food, but don’t for our knowledge for South Indian cuisine never grew beyond idli sambar and masala dosa. She’s also the sort of girl who has normal friends – they don’t just wear Louis Vuitton and talk Bordeaux. We appreciate that!

To put things in perspective, Kajal Agarwal is a stunningly bred Punjabi girl who’s been born and brought up in Mumbai and who stuck cinematic gold in Tamil and Telugu cinema. The best way to strike up a conversation with her is to ask her why she has a South Indian accent. “I don’t,” she protests. She does, but like the laugh, you can get used to it too.

Between it all, she is also obsessed with cricket – and not IPL, but the real test version of the game. And she’s distraught about the walloping the Indian team recently received in England. Only unlike you, she has not suddenly started braying for their blood. Not yet anyway. She has more faith.

As far as her return to Bollywood is concerned, she looks at it more as a homecoming and as a natural progression more than anything else. However, she is now much more careful about what she says than she was before, ever since purists in the Tamil and Telugu industry threatened to ban her. Agarwal though is clear that she does not want to descend onto screens sporting a bikini anytime soon – just to look glamorous. She doesn’t really need to (refer to cover picture for reference). But she’d tell you she has her reservations, and then laughs about never having kissed onscreen. She did cheat a kiss once though, she teases.

There are only two downers – the grammar in her tweets and the fact that she doesn’t know whom S.M. Krishna is. And we took care of one of those – all you have to do is turn the page for all that you need to know about S.M. Krishna. The grammar bit you can always get used to.