On Broken Dreams

Aishwarya Rai

Even when I hadn’t heard about her, I wanted to be Aishwarya Rai. Last Saturday, when I saw the beauty queen at an Indian restaurant, where we had gone to lunch, my repressed aspirations sprung up once again. And I tried to pacify my wanton heart, as I always do when overcome with unreasonable longings, by reciting this couplet by Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor:

Do tell these desires to find a home elsewhere,
My miserable heart cannot host all of them!

(Kah do in hasraton se kahin aur ja basen,
Itni jagah kahan hai dil-e-daagdaar mein!)

The fineries and the layers of make-up that adorned Aishwarya Rai from head to toe couldn’t conceal her ethereal beauty. She looked vulnerable, ingenuous, and exquisite—all at the same time. Her sealed lips were like a pair of ripened jalapeno. Her beautiful eyes, which looked like amla or gooseberry, were doleful and did all the talking.

I stood mesmerized and forgot the purpose of my visit to the toilet. After gazing at her large framed-portrait on the toilet wall for a long time and reciting the above-mentioned lines, I came to my senses, and then I washed my hands, looked at my sad face in the mirror, and walked out of the rest room. I do not so much as pick my nose, or scratch my… head in front of any picture depicting a human figure, leave aside using a toilet.

There was a time when I had the potential to become Aishwarya Rai. As a little girl, at every fancy-dress event, I masqueraded as Miss India in my sash and crown made from silver foil collected from empty cigarette packets. On normal days too, I was fond of dressing up and watching myself in a dressing-table mirror for hours. My elders would try to wean me away by warning that those who sat in front of a mirror for too long turned into witches, or grew horns and beard, or got trapped inside the mirror. Had they been consistent with one theory, I might have given it a consideration.

In my teen years, I would spend more time looking at the lissome models and film stars in the magazines than studying my drab and boring textbooks. I wanted to look glamorous and gorgeous like them, so I began following all the beauty regimens—sometimes with disastrous results—which I found in the women’s magazines. And once in a while, I also exercised—skipped rope and touched toes. I was plump and of average height, and wore thick black-rimmed glasses. Although, I had broken many bones in the course of my recreational activities such as jumping fences and climbing trees, they had all healed in due course leaving negligible disfigurations.

For successive years, I wistfully looked at the pictures of Miss India pageants, in which I didn’t want to participate, only because of the following clause, as it would have had put restrictions on the other possible lucrative contracts:

“Once you are short listed, you cannot be a part of any other commercial contract or pageant.”

During those years, I also had a crush on Amitabh Bachchan, the reigning super star. Becoming a Bachchan bahu was my second dream, but he was too old for me. Otherwise my great-uncle Balasaheb Thackeray would have had arranged my marriage with him. Just for the record, he never says no to Great-Uncle who treats him like a member of our family. When Balasaheb tells Amitabh that he wants to see Rann, the latter’s latest movie, the super star assures him that he would arrange a projection at Matoshree.


Now my bad luck has been so rotten that even after waiting several years for the son, Abhishek Bachchan, to grow up, he was still much younger than I was when he became a star. So once again, I missed the opportunity of becoming a bahurani at Prateeksha. My loss has been a gain for the beauty with the doleful amla eyes.

She is one lucky gal to have such a great father-in-law who also kowtows to Shri Narendra Bhai Modi, whom I revere as God, because only God can let a catastrophe like Gujarat riots happen and then get away with it. They look like Lord Rama and Hanuman in the following video:

Thus my dream of becoming Aishwarya Rai or a Bachchan bahu has been broken into many pieces. With a heavy heart, I swept all the pieces under the carpet. Every once in a while when I’m alone, I do take them out and try to reassemble. And when the mess becomes too much to handle, I wish I had concentrated more on my school textbooks rather than on those glamour magazines.

For Bachchan fans here are some beautiful family pictures from good old days, and here is his simple, banal, everyday blog. Read it in good faith, keeping in mind that he is an actor, not a philosopher or a writer or a thinker.

As for Aishwarya Rai’s pictures you don’t need my help. She is one of the most beautiful and most googled women on this planet. *Sigh*