Juhi Chawla doesn’t look like a campaigner. The word activist usually throws up an image of a woman in a khadi kurta in earthy tones, with a cloth bag slung across the shoulder. Chawla is wearing a salwar kurta in pretty pink, and has a tika on her forehead.

I have been waiting for her at her Malabar Hill residence in south Mumbai. She and her industrialist husband Jai Mehta own three floors of Veer Bhavan. It is late in the evening, and a cool Arabian breeze has embraced the night when Chawla walks in. She had gone to a temple to seek blessings for her daughter’s birthday, she says with a smile.

In her forties now, her eyes are still mischievous, though they have been tinged by the vicissitudes of life. You can tell that the song Jaadu teri nazaar in the 1993 film Darr — which starred Chawla and Shah Rukh Khan — was written for her. There is certainly magic in her eyes.

The skin is bare, barring the tika on her forehead. Chawla, unlike many other actresses of her time, doesn’t like to swathe her face with make-up. And again, unlike her contemporaries, some of whom apparently go through such unmentionables as a broccoli diet to keep slim, Chawla is happy doing just yoga.

The woman who marked her debut 25 years ago with Aamir Khan in Qayamat se Qayamat Tak has a voice that still grabs your attention. It’s a voice infused with laughter — and many believe is one of the reasons she, with her girl-next-door looks, caught the imagination of cinegoers. Last year she dubbed the voice of Lord Krishna’s mother, Yashoda, in the animation film Krishna Aur Kans.

The voice now draws attention to a mission that she has been waging for the last few years — against cellphone towers, installed in residential areas and elsewhere across the country. The towers have antennae that emit radiation, which can cause damage to the body, and even lead to death, Chawla says.

Her mission started soon after her brother, Bobby Chawla, the CEO of Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies, collapsed from brain haemorrhage while dining in a restaurant in 2010. When he was in hospital in a state of coma, she discovered that 14 mobile phone tower antennae had sprung up right opposite her house.

“Our house is on the sixth floor. The 14 antennae just came up, zoop, taing, taing, taing. I didn’t notice them. It was my husband who pointed them out to me. ‘This is not good,’ he said. I told him, ‘Let us not panic. Let us get some data.’ At that point of time, there were hardly any articles about cellphone towers. So we located an agency for checking radiation,” she says.

“Even before he (the representative) sent me the report, he showed me his radiation measuring machine where the needle was shooting beyond the maximum danger level. For me, that was alarming enough,” she says.

Chawla probed some more, and was concerned when she heard that the watchmen in the building had been taking headache tablets every day after the antennae came up.

The campaign carried. They met the chief minister and others in the government. The cellphone tower companies put the cluster 10 feet back, but that didn’t help in reducing the radiation, she says.

The months went by and nothing much happened. “Then Mr Prakash Munshi, who is a neighbour, came into our lives and things picked up. He came up with the idea of putting up banners to draw the attention of the chief minister who lives close by. The banners said things like, ‘Cell tower radiation causes headaches, sleep disturbances, memory loss, fatigue, miscarriage, heart problems, cancer and leukaemia’.”

The group’s luck turned one day when a bunch of media people went to the chief minister’s residence for a meeting and saw the banners. “The story went live and within a month the towers were gone, the antennae were gone. At the time municipal elections were due and zoop, we were free. They did install booster antennae but the dangerous vertical ones were gone.”

Local groups have been encouraged by Chawla’s campaign, but not everybody is happy. Minister and member of Parliament Milind Deora was recently quoted as saying that “local civic bodies should not interfere” in cellphone tower installations. What does she feel about that?

“If he has not been misquoted, what he is saying is terribly wrong. He should know that children’s skulls are thin and soft. The radiation enters and affects their brain far more than it does in an adult. How can a responsible minister make a statement like this?”

The actress has now installed radiation shields and curtains in her children’s rooms. “This is like smoking, you know. It took 50 years before people realised that smoking actually kills. I am glad that we are talking of the ill effects of mobile antenna radiation. A solution will come around and it will happen soon.”

Has this made her more aware of larger ecological issues? “What I have been wondering about is what we have done to our world,” she says after a long pause. “We have contaminated our food with pesticides. We do not know what the GM (genetically modified) crops will do to us. Look at what we are doing to our air. We are polluting it with factories, vehicles, aeroplanes — zoom, zoom, zoom. What are we doing to our water?”

Technology, she adds, has a downside. “We put up these cellphone towers in the air. It is great technology — it allows us to Skype and get connected. But when I see people, especially children, with phones stuck to their ears talking for several hours, I am so afraid for them. Do they know that they are doing? What have we done to our world in the name of connectivity?”

Has Chawla’s sensibilities evolved over the years because of the tragedies in her family? She lost her mother, Mona Kapoor, in an accident in 1998 in Prague while she was shooting for Duplicate. Her cousin lost the battle to cancer and her brother is still in a coma. “What you are asking me is a lot, very large,” she says, and her voice trails off.

She is quiet for almost two minutes. “My world has been shaken in different ways,” she finally replies. “There has been a series of happenings in my life — my parents, aunt, brother, cousin. All of it has changed my view of life. When people said: ‘If you go away from God that is when things go wrong and that is when you need to come back closer to yourself’ I never understood it. Today I think it means that when your life becomes too artificial you need to really get back in touch with yourself.”

Artificial, she adds, can refer to social interaction, to food or the air. “Or you are all over the place and you do not know who you are… you are stressing yourself trying to please others. The most calming thing I now find is nature.”

And how, as a busy actress, does she find the time to bond with nature? After all, unlike other actresses of her time, she hasn’t given up acting, but continues to play mature roles. She is now working in a film called Gulab Gang with Madhuri Dixit. Businesswise, she was also among the first heroines to become a producer. She teamed up with Shah Rukh Khan and started Dreamz Unlimited and had a big stake in the Kolkata Knight Riders. So where’s the time for finding inner peace?

“My gosh, I can go to any natural place and I can feel a palpable calmness. I never felt that earlier. I took it for granted earlier. Today I value all those things and I look at them with new eyes. I realise that I feel peaceful like when I am with my kids. I have changed as a person hugely. I do yoga. I understand the importance of our heritage, the wisdom of the sages. Practically every day for 90 minutes I do things for myself. When I don’t do it, I know I’ve made a wrong start.”

She asks me if I practise yoga. “Make a little time for it,” she advises me. “Start your day with the pranayam — you will see a certain calmness.”

How has she changed as a person, I ask her. “I realise who I am. Anything I do, I do with my heart and my soul. I don’t have to worry about results any longer. I am not in 10 minds like I used to be. Earlier, paise ke liye, naam ke liye karti thi (I used to work for money, for fame). Today I will only do something if I want to do it. Work is not work — it is a joy now.”

The changes in her, she adds, have happened gradually. I ask her if her brother’s illness changed her. “The last two years have been life altering. My brother and I were very close because we don’t have other siblings. I didn’t realise how strong that bond was until he actually fell ill.”

There was a time, she adds, when she thought he’d get better. “When he just fell ill, I was in a frenzy. I thought he was going to wake up. There was no other way. Now I am not so sure. When I see him there, I pray for his release.”

Her eyes well up. And I realise that Juhi Chawla is still fighting a battle.