Shweta Bachchan Nanda pens down the foreword to Rajinikanth's daughter, Aishwaryaa's memoir!

Aishwaryaa Rajinikanth Dhanush and Shweta Bachchan Nanda share much more than their cinema demigod dads. Both are regular girls, who were raised in India’s most revered and closely-watched families. They understand what it is to live under their extraordinary father’s overwhelming persona. They’ve lived their life seeing their larger-than-life fathers see off prying media attention. Both of them are proud daughters, who understand the role their families play in being the ultimate pillar of strength and support to their extraordinary fathers. Here’s Shweta’s foreword to Aishwaryaa’s memoir on her life as Rajinikanth’s daughter...

THE FOREWORD

I first met Aishwaryaa a year ago, when she accompanied her father to a football match, and I had gone with mine. We took our seats behind them as they cheered and clapped their teams on, like excited boys. I could almost read her thoughts. She was thrilled that her father had got an opportunity to let his hair down for a while in the company of a friend, and, at least for a couple of hours, the world’s eyes were not trained on him. I know this because I was thinking the very same thing about my father.

When she called to ask if I would write the foreword to her first book, Aishwaryaa mentioned feeling an affinity to me, as one might with someone who has shared similar life experiences. A few hours later, she very efficiently sent me a rough draft of her book.

That evening, as I sat reading, I caught myself smiling at some parts, nodding my head in agreement at others. It was all so relatable. These could have been vignettes from my own life, experiences I had shared with my own father. It’s uncanny how similar our trajectories are. Our fathers have been colleagues and friends for years, our families have always had the highest regard for each other. It’s easy to see why we have so much in common, not just in our public lives but in our private moments as well.

What the book beautifully brings to life is the story of a regular girl growing up in a not-so-regular home. The story of a mother bringing up her daughters in the gargantuan shadow of their father and being able to bring them up as unspoiled by it as possible. Very often we watch our idols on screen and they take on the superhuman qualities of the characters they portray. What Standing on an Apple Box does is lift the curtain and give you a peek at the men and women behind the make-up and the family units that helped to make them what they are. The stories from Aishwaryaa’s childhood are charming in their simplicity and I couldn’t get enough of the escapades from the life of one of the world’s most recognised men. Though her father is an extraordinary man in every sense of the word, it is the ordinary rituals that he practises in his life, whether for himself or his family, that very clearly are the secrets to his success, as his daughter tells it. Her account of him manages to make a revered icon accessible and, in doing so, she gives hordes of fans the most authentic version of their hero.

This book is the story of a father and daughter, an icon and his fans, a man and his family. What I like best about it is that is real, from the heart, and bone honest.

SHWETA BACHCHAN NANDA