*Our Kalki has been hitting her P.R. stride lately. Social software and vernacular video are acting on Bollywood like a tonic. I'm following currently Priyanka Chopra, Mallika Sherawat, Preity Zinta, Abhishek Bachchan and Karan Johar, while Kalki's boyfriend/director Anurag has a high-minded cinema blog.
*Kalki is the most intriguing of all current Bollywood personnel because Kalki is so wildly improbable and yet so totally imperturbable. I"m sure that Kalki doesn't consider herself incredible (even when she's premiering plays about skeletal Eskimos in Bangalore), but for any critic with an objective sense of judgement, just watching the woman make a fruit salad on YouTube is mind-boggling. Kalki's settling right into her Bollywood Dolce Vita. She ditched the global hippie-chick suitcases and she's calmly hanging out in the BF's apartment watching 5,000 DVDs. Why do I know these intimate things about Kalki? Not because I ever asked. I never left my chair. So much Kalki material is hitting my search-radar now that I may well start a new BEYOND THE BEYOND category called "Kalki Watch."
*Totally digging this latest no-budget Kalki video in which Kalki artlessly confesses her fondness for wearing Indian saris. I can't doubt that this is sincere. Any actress in Kalki's position would be doing every conceivable passive-aggressive female Indian nationalist gesture: whipping into green-white-and-saffron saris, touching the feet of filmi elders, referring to elderly people as Whoever-ji, performing pooja in historic temples, stage-dancing in Dubai, campaigning for Congress candidates, landing lucrative cosmetics accounts,... So of course Kalki's wearing some saris. Kalki looks great in her saris, too.
*What'll REALLY impress me is when Filmi Girl from filmigirl-dot-blogspot starts sporting a sari. Then we'll know that the global metamedium is truly becoming the message. When Bollywood bloggers start getting all Bollywood themselves, then Indo-global soft power is gonna be firing on all its Shiva-armed cylinders.
http://filmigirl.blogspot.com/2009/12/saturday-gossip.html
*If I were a PR guy from, say, Yash Raj productions, I would ship Filmi a sari pronto. I'd ask her to put it on in public and YouTube herself.
Bollywood Bling With Kalki Koechlin
di hungama*In other startling Bollywood news, Abhishek Bachchan, Mr Aishwarya Rai and the son and heir of the most famous actor on our planet, seems to be an almost entirely normal and decent human being. I follow Abhishek's Twitter stream, and he's by far the least-exotic Bollywood actor I've ever seen. The guy completely lacks actorly snobbism. This prince of global cinema comes across like the helpful and affable owner of some local hardware store. I have no idea how that could have possibly happened. It kills me.
(((Later: here comes another Kalki video in the time it took me to post this. And Kalki's SINGING. Singing without any overdubbing, even though everyone who sang in Bollywood for the past entire century of Indian cinema had an overdub.)))
