Alia Bhatt used her ‘Genius Of The Year’ self-spoof to silence the many thousand tongues that wagged on about her ‘Prithviraj Chauhan is the President of India’ faux pas on ‘Koffee With Karan’. She didn’t go into convoluted explanations – Bollywood’s New Big Thing really doesn’t have much time for such things! But she does take time off to shrug away her verbal gaffes, saying “I’m very impulsive; I say the first thing that comes to my mind.” “That’s why people might think, ‘Oh she’s so stupid, so ditzy.’ But I’d rather be stupid than pretend to be intelligent,” she points out.
Pretence is a bad word in Bhatt’s dictionary; not surprising at all for the offspring of the brutally honest Mahesh Bhatt and unconventional Soni Razdan. Refusing to be drawn into the saccharine sweet façade that the industry can be, she avers that a person can get really fake saying nice things for no reason, or even smiling without any real provocation. She believes that this does not translate into a rudeness carte blanche – one must always be kind is what she believes… “But it gets scary when you start believing in the façade.”
Her rationale is very simple – acting is for the screen only. Playing a character for a film and playing one in real life as well is exhausting business, she feels, and something she will not be part of. So does this mean she cares two hoots about the impression she makes? Not quite. She does want to be the most loved person in India, she points out, but she wants to be loved and adored for being the person she is. Not the image the country would like to believe is the real Alia Bhatt.
And she is quite serious about wanting to be loved across the country… In fact, she looks forward to the day when the posters of Aishwarya Rai flaunted in small beauty parlours in towns are replaced by images of hers!
There is no danger of success going to her head, though, not when she insists on keeping it real. “Even when people compliment me I think, ‘If this is what success is, then I’m very bored’.” She prefers chilling with her small group of friends, six people who are very close to one another. Mingling with the many who are trying to curry favour is not her style at all – “Even if people try and get familiar, I don’t respond,” is how she handles it.
Alia admits quite happily that she never got tagged ‘Sexy’ but the ‘cute’ tag which she has been bestowed is not one that pleases her too much either. “I hate it when people call me cute,” she says, adding, “That’s something I want to get rid of, but otherwise I’m fun.” Apparently she has guys telling her all the time that she would make a great girlfriend because she is not “one of those irritating types”. But will she ever go on record to clarify her status on dating Varun Dhawan/ Arjun Kapoor/ Siddharth Malhotra? No siree, not in this lifetime!
