Bollywood star (oh, how she loves that phrase!) Bipasha Basu recently tore her knee doing dance steps in Bangkok. “I didn’t even know it was a tear,” she explains, “There was a lot of pain in Bangkok and I didn’t know what it was. It’s a very common occurrence in the legs of active people like dancers and athletes. There’s no cure for it. If you lead a routine life it doesn’t bother you at all. Otherwise there’s arthroscopy. But my orthopaedic surgeons have not advised it.”
Bipasha is filming in Thailand for the movie Freeze with Neil Nitin Mukesh where she pushes him off the top of a building – much as she did with Saif Ali Khan in Race. “Race was a hit,” she says, “And if Freeze turns out to be a success they’ll think my pushing heroes off buildings is lucky for a film. Everyone will start writing in a ‘heroine-pushes-hero’ scene into all my scripts. I’m becoming a hero-pusher.”
Bipasha, who is 29 years old and one of the most bankable stars in Bollywood with two big hits already this year in Race and Bachna Ae Haseeno, has been quite rightly commenting lately on ageism in Bollywood. Firstly, she objects to being referred to as the ‘senior’ haseena in BAH. Secondly, she has looked through the 30 age barrier and seen that the industry doesn’t offer much to the working woman these days except Mother-and-Auntie roles.
Bipasha has had a very successful career so far. Having gotten off to a good start with a Best Female Debut Award for Ajnabee, she was then nominated for a Best Actress Award for Raaz opposite Dino Morea, lifting to a higher level the horror genre in the process. Other notable films have included Jism, No Entry, Corporate, Dhoom 2, No Smoking and Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal.
Bipasha has been upset recently by scurrilous rumours in the more irresponsible Bollywood press that she has been driving a wedge in the Deepika Padukone-Ranbir Kapoor partnership during the promotional phase of the successful Bachna….. She has dismissed this out of hand. “Let me say it right now, Ranbir is not a good friend, he is a great friend,” she states for the record. “I enjoyed working with him throughout the film. Though I didn’t work alongside Deepika, I spent a lot of time with her during the promotion. I get on well with her.” Still, that kiss on screen with Ranbir does look quite remarkably hot!
Bips two next films both sound very interesting. In Phankh, she plays an imaginary character created by a boy who has to dress up as a girl for his Bollywood career; and then she is making a Bengali movie – she comes from a Bengali family herself, though born in New Delhi – which is about a woman who finds life with her poet husband confusing but when he dies and she starts reading his poetry, she begins to fall in love with him.
