Fan Blog: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan - the woman she is now, as Saba Taliyar Khan

Here is a fan's tribute to Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and her role of Saba in Karan Johar's Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. Have a dekko and enjoy!

I have two strands of thought in me at this moment. As I let Bulleya grow on me, I'm struggling to decide which one to begin the article with.

First thought! When that picture of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan from the sets of Ae Dil Hai Mushkil was posted a few days ago - yes, the one where she's in a white mini, expertly put together with a black overcoat, a pair of boots and a sequinned bag by Manish Malhotra looking expectedly picture perfect - I got busy reading the comments as always. Some had remarked how Sushmita Sen would've been better cast in the role of the Urdu Poetess who wants not to be needed, but to be desired. I could see where they were coming from, and I found myself sharing their sentiment too. Johar (and his casting director Shanoo Sharma) casting Sen, I then thought, would've been casting to type, whereas with Rai Bachchan, I presumed, Johar had wanted to cast against type. 

Second Thought! Last night I watched the Q&A session that Johar partook in at the Toronto International Film Festival. He was being witty, honest, and working the crowd with an ease that we have come to expect of him. And I thought to myself that underneath that canny operator must lie another Karan Johar, a being with deep perceptiveness of people and complete self-awareness; the being that has made a sensitive and emotionally accurate filmmaker of the man outside it, in spite of, by his own admission, his not being a reader of books or a follower of world cinema. 

And this is when I thought that of course, Johar would cast his friend Ms. Rai Bachchan as his Saba Taliyar Khan. "She plays a poet who isn’t a very good poet, and so she is aware that she isn’t as respected in her community of poets. This is partly because she is too beautiful to be taken seriously. She comes from a situation of heartbreak herself", says Johar himself. And doesn't this sound like a case of, and I'm purely speculating here, art imitating life? 

Rai was once the girl that was the epitome of innocence, of purity, of untouched beauty. She was the Pushpa that never would raise her tone, the Kalpana that was just out of boarding school; the Marie-Anne Dashwood to Tabu's elder Eleanor; the girl-with-the-giggles on a rendezvous with Simi Garewal; the Nandini that chased and caught up with the moped-truck; the heart-breaking Binodhini; the Parvathi- the girl next door. (I still remember watching for the first time Dola Re Dola, and being struck by the contrast between the girlhood of Parvathi and the whole woman that was Ms. Dixit as Chandramukhi).

Then this Rai became Rai Bachchan, and the new bride blossomed in front of us all as Jodhaa. And then came the motherhood, and with it her physical transformation. And I never would forget that audacity with which she walked the Cannes Red Carpet in that midnight blue Elie Saab in the year 2012. And then when she stepped out the following year in that golden Cavalli, it was as if a whole new woman had been born. Gone were the days when her Armani required a modest stole around her arms. 

'This is me', she now appears to state, as we witness her exits from the airport, leading her movie promotions, taking centre stage in that holiday photograph aboard the yacht with her family; her voice is deeper, her conviction stronger and her stance seems more surefooted by the day. At times she appears to carry an air of melancholy, but even that appears to bolster her path to a more mature womanhood. And it would appear that this woman, called the most beautiful in the world, would take on ageing not just as natural progression but also as a metamorphosis; that while a woman expecting just approval of her appearance would get herself slimmer, and fitter to gain it, the woman who has been given that approval, and then some more over the decades would grow into her own skin through motherhood and all the transformation that it entails. 

I cant wait to see her in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, because Rai Bachchan, by her own confession, is as good an actress as her director wants her to be, and I don't think there could be a way by which she could float her way out of Johar's all-seeing eyes. "Aishwarya Rai exudes not the frightening seriousness of a woman who thinks she is being sexy, but the grace and ease of a woman who knows she is fun to look at and be around. What a smile. What eyes. Rai is not remotely overweight, but neither is she alarmingly skinny; having deliberately gained 20 pounds for this role, she is the flower of splendid nutrition", said the late great Roger Ebert of her as Lalita Bakshi in Bride & Prejudice, and I foresee her being in similarly top form here as Saba Taliyar Khan.

And I now think that of course Johar has cast her to type. He appears to have cast her exactly because he knows the woman she is now, and inscrutable as she is, she could by no means not know that her director can see her, and any attempt at holding on to the facade of imperviousness would be futile. And who would've thought that a decade and a half after Devdas, Johar, an admirer of its maker Mr. Bhansali, would be the man that brought out the Chandramukhi in his Parvathi.