Movie profile: Gayatri Joshi

Telling it like it is

Gayatri Joshi. The Swadesgirl. That’s her USP and that’s how she has been labeled. At a time when many young starlets opt for glamour roles to climb the Bollywood ladder at light speed, Joshi opted for the role of a (fully clad) village teacher in Swades.

Gayatri Joshi is one lucky girl. She made her debut opposite Shah Rukh Khan in an Ashutosh Gowarikar-directed film. Very few can expect a better launch in the big, bad world of Hindi films. You go looking for an insipid, regular interview with a newcomer and she surprises you with her candor.

Joshi started her career as a model. A string of successful assignments later, the sweet-faced lass landed Swades. She knows that she can be more versatile and says she has already broken several Bollywood rules the most important among them being that a pretty model who used to play a middle-class Indian mother in ads became Shah Rukh Khan’s heroine. Joshi had already ‘acted’ with Shah Rukh in a commercial. Gowarikar made her do three auditions before he decided that she was the heroine of Swades. Her attitude oozes oodles of confidence about her ability to make it in Bollywood. She was not overly apprehensive about working with King Khan or Gowariker, she says. Now, that is confidence.

In fact, her first scene with Khan in the film was the first scene shot as well. After several rehearsals, the scene came out perfectly. She says Khan was a great help to her during the filming and she was able to learn a lot from him. Though she does admit that some off-screen chemistry is necessary to make an on-screen pairing click, she believes that it is like any other job and one should take an objective view of it. Besides, she reasons, onscreen chemistry is a rather elusive concept. Sometimes, people who are close off-screen need not necessarily click on-screen.

Joshi stands out among Bollywood heroines who generally have ‘godfathers’ backing them. She agrees that having a godfather might help initially but in the long run, it is one’s work that speaks for itself. True and one hopes with this attitude, Joshi scales great heights in the world of films.