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Journalism of Courage
Much mayhem
With Thursday being a holiday, the city celebrated the mid-week break with gusto. On Wednesday night the place to be at was Santacruz. The event: a darshan of Scream, a new night club at Hotel Airlink. Promoted by Options 1, the event company set up by former models Aseem and Mamta Merchant, the man of the night without doubt was Kishen Mulchandani. The owner of Palkhi is definitely among the city’s most influential party makers. For Scream’s first night he managed to draw at least 200 close’ friends. From the world of modelling there was Svetlana Casper, Lascelles Symons, Dino Morea and Lara Dutta. Keeping them company were Ness Wadia, Sanjeev Chowdhury, Shernaz Dinshaw and OOMPH’s Kamlesh Shah and Sabah Khaleli. The party continued till the wee hours of the morning and even though the club was quite a way out for town’s regular partygoers, people kept pouring in till dawn break.England seemed to be the topic of conversation that night as both Ness and Shernaz are planning to spend alarge chunk of their time there. Shernaz is planning to open a lifestyle store in Kent and is leaving in a couple of months time. Ness is off to do his masters at the prestigious Warwick University. The Wadia scion spent all of last year preparing for this big step — he slogged it out in his father’s firm to get ready for the grind of academia.
Once the party momentum built up, then the city just rocked and rolled through the rest of the week. The next night photographer Sumeet Chopra held a party to celebrate his birthday. At his Cuffe Parade residence there were even more models per square foot than at Scream. Madhu Sapre, Lisa Ray, Helen Brodie and Aparna Sharma were some of the lissome lovelies spotted. Sister Sangeeta Chopra was there with beau Tarun Raghavan. Mingling with the ad crowd and designers were a few Bollywood types too. Gauri Khan (looking even better than the pictures Sumeet had shot of her for the Manish Malhotra catalogue) came with Dianne Pandey. Both star wiveswere looking incredibly svelte — not that it stopped them from burning up even more calories on the dance floor. Fardeen Khan also made an appearance and so did Jackie Shroff. It seems that in the world of advertising and glamour Sumeet weilds considerable clout.
Model moves
But not all models had time to party the week away. Achla Sachdev has been keeping a very low profile at the moment as most of her waking hours have been spent planing a mega event scheduled for the coming weekend. She is choreographing a show — and this time it has nothing to do with fashion. Achla is organising a toon cricket match where characters from the TNT-Cartoon Network like Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear, Tom and Jerry will play cricket against state-level cricketeers. Luckily, Achla is a real cricket buff so she has truly enjoyed planning the event. The other model hard at work is Namrata Barua. Instead of letting her hair down this weekend she went off to Pune to take part in a vintage car rally. This BBC Style! hostobviously loves living life on the fast track.
Last note
Last week was Jules Fuller’s last week at Channel V. And he ended his tenure with the music channel in style. Jules and a host of veejays, like Suchitra Pillai and Marc Robinson, headed to Cochin for a roadshow. Apparently, the show was a huge hit and the music channel seems to have captured quite a few southern hearts. Luckily the event did not turn into a tearful affair. Even though Jules bids farewell to the company, he is not severing his ties with the music business. He will still help Channel V organise events and promote new talent.
But people are more concerned about the future of his relationship with veejay Sophiya Haque. While the two are inseparable, they remain cagey about their state of togetherness. Even friends do not encourage speculation.
And finally…
Models, it seems, learn only from their mistakes and not from the boo-boo’s of their friends. What else could explain their foolhardy plunge intoBollywood? Can you think of a single model who has become a big film star? Sushmita Sen, Aishwarya Rai, Namrata Shirodkar … the list of flops is endless. Preity Zinta seems to be the exception to the rule but she is only two films old and she was never a top model.
The latest in line — for what seems sure shot slaughter — are Bipasha Basu and Aditi Govitrikar. While Bipasha’s screen debut has been much-talked about (remember, she was in Refugee and then she was not), Aditi’s brush with Bollywood is as recent as her two Govinda music videos. Interestingly, both models have signed up Southern films. Perhaps they feel that the way to Bollywood is through Mollywood. Shall we remind them of Ash’s disastrous Mani Ratnam flick Iruvar? On the other hand, who knows? Stranger things have been known to happen. Maybe they will succeed where no one else has.
