The Ides of March actually marks a turning point, even new beginnings.
March 15 is celebration day, even more so this year for birthday girl Alia Bhatt, the petite 5’3” who turns 29 and makes new beginnings in her 10th year as an actress. A fresh start would seem an erroneous misstatement when she is perched at the peak after a searing performance in Gangubai Kathiawadi that belied her young years. A piece of her heart that she placed with angst before Bhansali’s camera stunned even her father, who wondered where his secure little girl with anglicised grandparents had picked it up from. “She astounded me,” he said.
Gangubai, a woman violated in the worst imaginable manner but finding dignity in living within the prison walls and making it a little more human for those around her, amazed Mahesh Bhatt. This was a woman Alia had never met in her life, her circumstances were never a part of her cossetted experiences.
Out of the many, two of Alia’s scenes left him amazed. One, where she talks to her mother over the phone, making a pathetic attempt to connect with a past that’s been wrenched away from her. “It was her loneliest scene,” Mahesh analysed. “She’s all alone but she’s okay with it.”
The other was her wanton drunken scene — a scene Hindi cinema normally reserves for its male actors. “Alia, with that tiny, fragile frame of hers, became the street girl, the alley cat.”
It made Mahesh ruminate that while the 70s brought out the angry young man, “Women today are not conforming, they are ready for a naked narrative.”
Alia’s fragility is misguiding. Who’d have thought that in post-Covid-19 times when the audience stepped gingerly back into theatres, an Alia-Bhansali powered film would hold itself, bring in over Rs 100 crore and continue to stand while Amitabh Bachchan (Jhund), Batman and Prabhas of Baahubali fame stumbled all around her?
Mahesh hadn’t foreseen any of this in Alia. “That’s why I say she’s an enigma,” he explained. “I never saw her take to this business of acting so passionately. Alia’s made of two parts. One has the talent that fuels her ambitions and her dreams. The Alia who races ahead, the achiever, fierce, committed, disciplined, gets what she sets out to achieve. The other part is a small child, very real, very humble.”
He didn’t but his “father” U.G. Krishnamurthy had seen signs. “Call UG my father, my master, whatever,” said Mahesh. “When Alia was barely nine years old, he said, ‘She’s going to be a star.’ It wasn’t a prediction, it was something he saw in her. Her aura, her charm, her charisma.”
But back to the antithetical start at the base at a time when Alia is at the peak. The announcement that she’s headed for Hollywood to co-star with Gal Gadot prompted her father to observe, “It’s a strange climax to start off again as a beginner in Hollywood. Just when she reaches the peak here, life says, ‘Hey, you’re back where you started, you’re back to being a newcomer.’ It’s a privileged position to be in where life says, ‘Don’t pop the champagne just yet because you’re entering another space where there are other much bigger artistes.’”
But how does it augur for Alia’s relationship with Ranbir Kapoor? “What I understand is that this relationship has roots far deeper than what people would imagine,” he replied bluntly. “Ranbir and Alia are immensely respectful of each other. Besides, the world is very different today. Going to Hollywood no longer amounts to going away. It’s just an eight-hour flight away, it’s like shooting in Delhi, Chennai or Hyderabad.”
For those who wonder if Alia’s current streak of commercial and critical success topped with the Hollywood assignment will upset equations with Ranbir, her father comments that this is what Ranbir would have wished for her. “He respects and adores her. They’re in this journey together.”
Happy birthday, Alia.
Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author
