Ironic, isn’t it, that after deciding to focus on smaller movies and more unusual, demanding roles, Dostana became the kind of big mainstream success I’d been dreaming of for so many years.
* * *
AS MY CAREER started to move in the right direction, I was determined to build on it and take it as far as I could. I continued to develop my skills, make bold choices, and work almost nonstop. In India, the success of an actor is measured not only in terms of awards and box office but also by the major brand endorsements that they sign, so this was an important aspect of my quest to cement my growing position as a leading actor in the film industry. Early in my career I had declined many brand opportunities that came my way, because I really wanted to focus on aligning with the right kinds of brands. I wanted to take on partnerships with brands that were leaders in their categories and had products I could see myself using as a consumer.
As my popularity grew, the brands came calling. From Nikon to Nokia to Samsung, and Pepsi to Sunsilk to TAG Heuer, I was proud of the roster of brands that I endorsed. But one important category remained unfilled: beauty and skin care.
It’s important to note that at the time in Asia, it was as de rigueur for skin care brands to promote whiter skin as it was for hair care brands to promote dark, lustrous hair. Given India’s history, the idea that a fairer skin tone is something to aspire to has been drilled into Indian culture for centuries, maybe longer. This destructive social norm isn’t limited to India, of course. Skin altering is a huge problem throughout all of Asia. In India, part of the fallout is that many bestselling products from major skin care brands for women promote themselves as “fairness creams.” While skin-whitening is a multibillion-dollar business throughout Asia, fair-skinned people in Europe, America, and elsewhere spend millions of dollars in tanning salons to darken their skin. The grass is always greener on the other side, I guess.
Given that brand deals are critical to the trajectory of an actor’s career in India, and that beauty and skin care brands are the most coveted for women, when these offers came my way, it felt like a great opportunity. These were well-respected global companies, and this combined with the fact that they wanted to sign me as the face of their brands signaled to me that I had scaled the mountain of measurable success and arrived at the top.
The creative directions of these commercials were different but the communication was very similar…beauty equated to fair and light skin. In the ads, the lightening of my skin seemed to be a primary point, while other attributes of the product were minimally showcased.
In spite of the cultural acceptance of this norm, I vividly remember a conversation I had with the brand team about evolving the messaging around this noxious narrative. To be fair, they did make an attempt but the market research they conducted always came back to the original messaging being the strongest. All I could think of was how I’d felt as a teenage girl using store-bought and homemade fairness concoctions because I believed my skin color made me unattractive. I thought about how pained I’d felt when I was called kaali as a child. I was now promoting the destructive messages that had so eaten away at my sense of self-worth when I was growing up, and I knew the only person I could blame was myself.
At this point in my life, I had evolved enough on my own inner journey to reevaluate both the implicit and the explicit cultural messages I’d absorbed over my lifetime. My aversion to all forms of discrimination toward girls and women—color being a fundamental one—had become more pronounced, and I knew that I didn’t want to be part of any campaign that perpetuated any feelings of insecurity or diminishment in our sex. So, I chose to take a definitive stance and distance myself from this archaic cultural norm. I haven’t done a skin care campaign in India since that time, almost a decade ago.
Unfortunately, this standard of beauty is so deeply entrenched in Indian culture that the major skin care brands still focus on skin lightening. While some brands are now taking steps to rebrand and reword their messaging—using euphemisms like skin “brightening,” for instance—the ads featuring popular faces still keep coming. I’m hopeful, however, that the more open discussion that’s happening around the world will lead to a time in the near future when girls and women will no longer feel the pressure to alter their skin tones.
Looking back, this was one of the biggest missteps of my career and is one of my most profound regrets. I can’t go back and change what I did, but I can apologize, and I do so sincerely. To all the people who saw the harmful messaging that I contributed to, to all the people who still have to see commercials like these in every medium—I am deeply sorry.
* * *
SHORTLY AFTER Fashion and Dostana, I signed on for the role of Sweety in Kaminey. People wondered why I would be interested in taking on a minor part after my triumphs in leading roles in those successful films. Two reasons: First, I no longer trusted that a film’s success and positive critical reaction for my role in it were enough to help me build a career. Second and even more important, perhaps, was the fact that I really wanted to work with the director, Vishal Bhardwaj, and I remembered that at the beginning of my career, Amitabh Bachchan quoted Stanislavski to me: There are no small parts, only small actors. I took on the role, prepping for it as if it were a starring part, and I won a lot of acclaim for it even though I was in just a handful of scenes. It was positive reinforcement for following my instincts in order to work with Vishal Sir, whom I was to collaborate with again—this time in a leading role—not too far into the future.
I continued to work in a mix of genres featuring a plethora of wildly different characters. In 7 Khoon Maaf, a noir comedy, I played a woman who kept killing her husbands—all seven of them. In Barfi!, I played a nineteen-year-old autistic woman in love with a deaf and mute man. I played the title role in Mary Kom, a biopic about the Olympic medal winner and the six-time world champion amateur boxer. In Bajirao Mastani, my role was that of a Marathi queen living in the 1600s. I played an aspiring actress, a kindergarten teacher, a fashion magazine editor, and an assortment of wives and girlfriends.
And so my Hindi movie career evolved. With each film, I added more acting tools to my toolbox; I gained more knowledge about the technical side of moviemaking; I understood better and better how to breathe life into the words on the page. With each film, I came to know myself a little more intimately as an actor, to recognize what came easily to me and what skills I needed to develop further, what excited me and what didn’t. Because I was and am ambitious, and because I’d had the experience of losing career-launching roles at the very start of my professional life, I decided I would never say no to a role I felt strongly about, even if it meant shooting two or three movies at a time, even if it meant I rarely had a full day off for weeks and months on end. It’s a decision that paid off well for me professionally, but the decision came with a price tag, and it’s one I wouldn’t understand for some years to come.
After throwing myself into my work for more than twelve years, just when it might have been time to reap the benefits of all the experience I’d gained and all the professional relationships I’d worked so incredibly hard to develop, just when I was at the top of my game in India, who knew my career would take another sharp left and I would, in essence, have to go back to walking into a room and introducing myself all over again?
As they say, “You want to tell God a joke? Tell her your plans.”
Mrs. Robinson, you are trying to seduce me. Aren’t you?
DUSTIN HOFFMAN IN THE GRADUATE
THE OPPORTUNITY THAT initially uprooted me from the career I’d worked so hard for in India and took me halfway around the world to America wasn’t acting. It was music.
In 2009, Anjula Acharia, a venture capitalist and tech investor, had an online platform called Desi Hits that was best known for taking artists like Lady Gaga and Britney Spears from America to India and producing music that was a cross-pollination of East and Wes
t. Legendary music producer Jimmy Iovine, co-founder of Interscope Records, who’d produced albums by Tupac Shakur, Eminem, 50 Cent, Stevie Nicks, and Tom Petty, among others, was an investor in the company. Jimmy had signed the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack to Interscope and worked with Anjula on the “Jai Ho!” collaboration between the celebrated A. R. Rahman, the song’s composer, and the girl band The Pussycat Dolls. It had become a huge international hit and now Anjula and Jimmy were searching for their next project. Which turned out to be me.
Rather than taking an American star to India, they wanted to bring an Indian star to the States. Anjula remembered seeing me in the rom-com Bluffmaster! on television years earlier while visiting her parents in England and thinking, If any South Asian could break into America at all, it would be her. It was the song “Right Here, Right Now”—a funky, sexy number—that had particularly impressed her. She forgot all about it, though, until her mother sent her a copy of the movie Fashion a couple of years later, saying, “It stars that actress that you like.”
Right, thought Anjula. I did like her. She showed the clip of “Right Here, Right Now” to Jimmy, who said, “No-brainer.” Because most of the musical numbers in Hindi films are lip-synced, though—the female part of this song was sung by Sunidhi Chauhan—he added, “Can she sing?”
Coincidentally, Anjula was working at the time with Salim-Sulaiman, an extremely popular and well-known music composer duo with whom I’d worked previously. It came up in conversation that they just happened to have a demo tape they’d done with me for fun a few years in the past, so the question of whether or not I could sing was easily answered.
I swear that was fate.
More than a whole year passed before things progressed. Anjula heard the demo and reached out to me, but I was finally working again with Vishal Bhardwaj, the director I’d wanted to work with so much in 2008 that I’d accepted a smaller part in Kaminey than I was then accustomed to taking, just for the chance to be directed by him. This time I was playing the lead character in 7 Khoon Maaf—an intensely noir comedy based on the Ruskin Bond novella “Susanna’s Seven Husbands”—and it was such an immersive experience for me that I wanted to keep myself completely focused on it. There were practical complications, too. We were filming in Coorg (now known as Kodagu), a hill station in the state of Karnataka in southern India. Our location was somewhat remote, and Internet and cell service were spotty. In order to speak to anyone, I had to go to the roof of the inn where we were staying and accept the call late at night after a full day of shooting.
One night I climbed to the rooftop to accept a call from Natasha Pal, who was my manager in India at the time and who now manages my digital strategy. She told me that she’d received several calls from Anjula and thought I should talk to her.
“I really don’t have the bandwidth to think about this right now, Nats,” I responded. “I don’t want to be distracted.”
“It will take ten minutes,” Natasha said. “I think you should be working internationally, and what Anjula is proposing will give you an opportunity to do that.” She let that sink in for a moment, then added, “I believe your career is global, Priyanka. At least talk to her.”
I stood on the rooftop in the darkness and thought about it. And because it was Natasha saying it—one of my closest advisors and dearest friends—I agreed.
Sometime later I climbed to the rooftop again to accept a late-night call from this persistent woman whom I had yet to meet. She gave me a lot to chew on during our twenty-minute conversation, outlining the possibility she saw for me to be one of the first artists from India—as opposed to Indian artists who had grown up in America—to succeed in mainstream American pop culture. Natasha had put the germ of an international career in my head; Anjula was explaining how it could happen. She was a successful businessperson, had impressive music cred, and I could hear how strategic she was. This was undeniably a big opportunity, and I’ve always been drawn to trying new and risky things. How could I resist?
It was 2010 when Anjula flew to Mumbai with David Joseph, who at that time was Universal Music’s U.K. chairman and chief executive, and Andrew Kronfeld, the executive vice president of marketing for Universal Music Group International. She wanted me to take the opportunity seriously, I learned long afterward, so she talked to Jimmy, who advised taking David Joseph along; David suggested inviting Andrew Kronfeld, too. Power in numbers. It was a good strategy.
We had a great meeting in Salim-Sulaiman’s studio, and the spark of curiosity about going international that had been planted in me was fanned into life. I didn’t know if I would be able to make music that people would want to listen to, but it was a chance to do something I hadn’t yet done professionally—music—on a huge stage I hadn’t worked on before—international—and that was intimidating and exhilarating to me at the same time. Because my movie career was established and I had commitments into the future, I was going to have to work music around my movies, and I’d only have time for two films a year, say, instead of four. Which meant that both of those had better succeed. That added an element of risk to my current career, as well as the risk involved in diving into music. If you’ve read this much of my story, you know that I’m not afraid of risk, and also that I love a challenge. This was another chance for me to sink or swim, and so I dove in.
Together Anjula and Jimmy created a label called Desi Hits/Interscope, which signed me. Working in London made sense to everyone, as it was much easier to get back and forth to India from England than from the U.S., and I needed to work around my film commitments. But when I arrived in London with Natasha for my first week of recording, I became hyperaware of my inexperience. I was surrounded by incredible songwriters, producers, and sound engineers who were all being brought on board to help me succeed, but I hardly recognized the thin voice coming out of me as my own. I got to feeling so shy that I’d turn off the light in the sound booth so I’d be cloaked in darkness and nobody could watch me while I sang. Was this the same person who danced unself-consciously in front of hundreds of people with bright lights and cameras trained on her? Was it a foreshadowing of some sort?
Sometime not long after that I was in New York City and finally met Jimmy Iovine when he, Anjula, and I had a memorable dinner at the Monkey Bar in midtown Manhattan. It was one of those dinners when everything just clicks. I don’t know what he was expecting, but as soon as Jimmy saw me, he turned to Anjula and said, “This is easy!” Right from the start he had a faith in my potential that I didn’t necessarily have at the time. As someone who has launched so many careers, and with such deep experience in both business and entertainment—he also co-produced Eminem’s critically acclaimed movie 8 Mile, and co-founded Beats Electronics with Dr. Dre—he became an extremely important part of my music chapter in the U.S. Even now I see him as a mentor and a friend. His belief in me was the extra nudge I needed to quiet my doubts about succeeding in an entirely new creative endeavor in an entirely new environment. And by the end of the dinner, we’d made a decision to bring me to the States to record under the Desi Hits/Interscope U.S. label.
It turns out that Jimmy’s “This is easy” assessment was overly optimistic. Given my lack of music credentials, we couldn’t pretend that I had music relevance—I didn’t, at all—and so it was crucial to establish myself as someone who was culturally relevant in the U.S. To do that, we would have to address the fact that even though I was at the top of my game in India, no one outside of the viewers of Bollywood movies knew who I was. So we focused on two major things: creating an awareness of me, and creating my sound.
The decision was made that it was important for me to spend more and more time in the U.S., flying in and out for important events, making sure that I met the Who’s Who of the music and the media industries. This was far easier said than done. I had to go into the offices of magazines that I’d been on the covers of multiple times in India and introduce myself as an absolute unk
nown, saying “Hey, I’ve been on your cover in India and I’m coming to America. Here’s who I am and this is my body of work.” Not everyone was open to meeting such a complete unknown, no matter what her credentials elsewhere were, much less writing about her in their magazine. This was at a time when I was having huge successes like Don 2 and Gunday and Krrish 3 and Mary Kom in India. I swallowed my pride and reminded myself constantly that just because I’d received recognition in one part of the world was no reason that I should automatically receive it elsewhere. I’d seen what a sense of entitlement could do and I wanted no part of that.
I faced the same problem with parties and red-carpet events. I knew that we had to do everything we could think of to make my presence felt in the well-oiled machinery that was Hollywood. And if I wanted to make my presence properly felt, I had to demonstrate that I was a peer and not a complete newcomer to the entertainment business. I had to be seen as someone who was on the same playing field, not someone who was in the upper reaches of the stadium seating. That meant being at important events like the Grammys, the Oscars, the Met Gala, and significant premieres, among other things. But it took a long time for those invitations to come. Although I had a large body of work amassed over a decade on another continent, I was reminded daily that I’d barely made it to the starting line here.
Slowly, slowly, inroads were made. The first year I received an invitation to the Roc Nation pre-Grammys brunch, I was pumped. I arrived with Anjula, feeling psyched that progress was being made. Simultaneously, she and I realized that we were on one side of the gathering and all the A-listers were on the other side. There was an absolute separation between the well-known entertainers at the party and everyone else. Both of us gazed at this clique of strangers for a while, and then Anjula slowly turned to me and said, “I know who you are and I know what you’ve done, but you should walk in that direction and introduce yourself to those people.” I looked at Anjula, understood what she meant, bent my head in humility, and walked into a sea of people who had no idea who I was.
Unfinished Page 14