'This is the best time for me'
Even while her home in Mumbai is being rebuilt, Preity Zinta's dream of building a house in her home town Shimla is about to be realised.
"I always wanted a family home in my home town Shimla. I'm now going to build a house there. The older one is in a locality that's so crowded I don't recognise it any more.Earlier, it was just our house and lots of trees,” Zinta said.
The actress has an ancestral plot where she is planning to build the house. "Now's the time to do it. Build a farmhouse where my kids and my brother's kids will grow up. It's a little away from Shimla, near the golf course. A gloriously green patch. I want to make it completely eco-friendly. It's so difficult to acquire anything eco-friendly here in Mumbai. But I am determined to buy an eco-friendly car.”
Zinta is looking at refurbishing her life entirely. "Last year I badly hurt my back and pelvis. We actors are constantly hurting ourselves and neglecting our health.” She describes this year of hers in the movies as the "India Shining Year”.
"After so many years of shooting abroad, I'm finally working in India. I just shot Samir Karnik's Mera Bharat Mahaan in Punjab. Now, I'm in Mumbai but apart from the crazy traffic and heavy rain, I'm enjoying myself,” she said.
Zinta, who was earlier looking at one assignment a year, is now busy devouring scripts. Her last commercial release was Jhoom Barabar Jhoom.
Best time
"This is probably the best time for me. There are no hard and fast rules about what I can do and can't do. Strangely, I started my career playing an unwed mother, a prostitute and a CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) trainee. Then I started doing much more commercial films.”
Zinta believes Indian cinema has changed for the better with Bollywood becoming more experimental and films offering a higher quotient of reality.
"The demographics of Indian cinema have changed. Youngsters in the industry have loads of potential and they want to experiment. Even the audience is ready to take a chance,” Zinta said
"Apart from just looking glamorous in the film, heroines are doing unconventional roles. Even heroes are playing characters with grey shades contrary to enacting the clichéd good-boy role,” she added.
"Now it's time for me to do a different kind of film. Working with Rituparno Ghosh and Jahnu Barua there was a lot to unlearn about acting. And it's not as if I look at The Last Lear or Har Pal as small films.”
"I want to do work that excites me. I'm not the same actress I used to be. I want to do at least one film every year that pushes the envelope. ”
And what about marriage? "Each time I'm asked this, I go... ummm! I'm a grown-up girl and I don't have to hide my marriage plans, when it happens. Everything happens in its own time.”
Maybe the housewarming and wedding can be combined in Shimla? "Ha, what if the house takes five years to make? I can't wait that long to get married,” comes the retort.
'Bravery is not just physical'
Preity Zinta , who is brand ambassador for the Godfrey Philips Bravery Awards, recently gave away the renowned Golden Ovary Awards. So what is bravery for Preity?
"Courage is contagious. It spreads from one person to the other and engulfs society and humanity. When we salute one woman from a remote village in India, an entire village of women stands up and holds its head high.
"Bravery is not just physical... showing compassion, supporting others and contributing towards bettering the world where we live is also an act of courage. "And Indian women are extremely strong and resilient... even physically. I have met a 17-year old girl who saved nine healthy men from drowning, a mother who fought with a leopard to save her
child, to name a few.” Preity herself won the Godfrey Philips Bravery Award in 2002 for being the only witness in court who did not retract earlier statements in a case against film producer Bharat Shah.
