Today, Bipasha Basu has managed to buy herself a fancy apartment and a car for herself. Life was, however, far from comfortable for her when she first came to Mumbai.
The actor unwinds about her initial struggle and life in the city, with Shubha Shetty-Saha
Today, Bipasha Basu has managed to buy herself a fancy apartment and a car for herself. Life was, however, far from comfortable for her when she first came to Mumbai to further her career. She says, “I hail from a very protected environment in Kolkata. I was a pampered person who never travelled by public transport. In Mumbai, at first, I lived alone in Kalina East in a room with one charpoy and a Sintex tank for water. The neighbourhood was full of truck drivers and the like, and commuting was a huge problem. It was a bit of a terrifying phase then. Now when I look back, I wonder how I managed. I don’t know how I survived. I tried travelling by train one day and realised that I could never do it. I would take a bus everywhere I went. My friend, photographer Farrokh Chothia helped me a lot at this point of time. He held my hand and guided me on how to go about looking for work.”
However, the self-made actor realised that the city is not as bad as she thought it was. “I soon found that Mumbai is a warm city. It forces you to go and fight for your own space. You cannot achieve anything by being lazy here. I have interacted with people from every community and every religion and never felt like an outsider, even when I had just started living here.”
A single woman in the city, Bipasha devised a way to protect herself. “My friends advised me to carry a hammer in my bag and I did that every day. Fortunately, I never got the opportunity to use it. In fact, my work demanded late hours and sometimes I have fallen asleep in the cab while travelling back home. Most people I have met here have been trustworthy.”
A little later, Bips bought a car for herself, but that didn’t help either. “I bought my first car, a second-hand Zen, along with a friend of mine. Though we split its price halfway, since I didn’t how to drive, my friend would drive it all the time. So, I would hardly get a chance to travel in it. Much later, I bought a Honda city for myself.”
It was only after a year that she shifted to Mumbai that her worried parents relaxed. “They were really anxious. But later when I became popular, they breathed easy. In the meanwhile, I had shifted to Bandra as a paying guest and my landlord, Peter and Claudia, had literally adopted me. So, life had become much easier then.”
s_shubha@dnaindia.net
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