I woke up yesterday and went “hey! What’s that strange brightness out my window? Could it be SUNLIGHT??? For the first time in two weeks?” And then here’s the real miracle, the same thing happened today!!!!!! So I took it as a sign that I should shoot as many videos as possible while I have light. “As many as possible” meaning, one ten minute video in the morning before I leave for the day, only to return when it is already dark.
I lost my train of thought a couple of times, and really this is not nearly as good as the original post which inspired it. But it’s sunny! It’s so so sunny!
dontcallitbollywood 
I’m at where you’re talking about Alia in the video and all I can think of is “there are very few women on film sets so who would a 16 year old actress even talk to?”
That’s a problem in most places. We had a deliveryperson training held by the company a couple of months ago and there were literally just 4 women in the crowd of more than a hundred people. It was me, one other female distributor and two female officials.
It is the same on film sets too isn’t it? All the technical jobs are held by men. And most girls doing their first few films (and basically ever after in their careers too), they’re wearing skimpy clothing. The girls’ clothing is supposed to be provocative. For someone not from the modeling industry, it can be intimidating. The instinct is to run off to the vanity van and focus on your hair and makeup or maybe rest your feet because you have to wear outrageously high heels.
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Exactly! And I hadn’t put it together, but this would also be part of heroines starting soooooooooooooo young. It’s one thing if you are 25 in a place with mostly men around, but if you are only a teenager, it would be that much harder to do anything besides say your lines and then run back to the safety of your chaperon.
I suspect Alia got to have a real learning experience on the Dear Zindagi set, it looks like Gauri Shinde had a mostly female crew. But I can’t imagine that was true for her other movies. And she can hang out with Karan at the Dharma offices and all that, but its not the same as hanging out with everyone from spotboys on up and seeing how the film gets made on the ground.
On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:12 AM, dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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I guess for someone like Alia in particular, who has a solid family name in the industry and the respect that comes with it, the pressures of showbiz aren’t really centred around people trying to act fresh or sleazy. For her first film she had two male debutantes which meant if they were hanging out with the crew, so was she. And that initial exposure would have helped her.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Kangana. No family name, no money, no training, couldn’t speak English, and had only the mercy of “contacts” which included men like Pancholi, the Suman kid and later Hrithik. You see how unhinged a girl with no modeling/pageant background and no background gets after years of working in Bollywood with no safety net.
Across industries, actresses have a short shelf life because there are not really essential to stories. They’re mostly eye candy. And eye candies are a dime a dozen.
If you look at the list of actresses that seem to have broken the trend, you’d find huge family names behind them. Sonam, with no hits in recent years, can make a film of her own. What other female AD with no family name has managed to do that? And in an industry that churns out more than a 1000 films every year!!
I find that even the stories of empowerment within the Indian actress community actually follow the producer ka beta trend.
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Katrina is the one I find interesting. And, strangely, I have to say kudos to Salman! She was clearly “safe” when she started out because of how his family adopted her. And even after the break-up, his family and Salman have still lined up to support her. She hasn’t been discarded or abused or anything, despite having no family connections to the industry. Sure it’s nepotism, in an odd way, but it’s also a nice thing to do for a woman you care about, making sure she isn’t destroyed like all the other actresses. Versus Aditya Pancholi who apparently just discarded Kangana and didn’t care what happened to her after that.
When I was doing my very long series of posts on the Kapoor family, I ended up feeling kind of the same way about Rishi and Neetu. I’d heard the stories about how he insisted she be home at a certain time, always knew which set she would be on, everyone from her directors to her co-stars knew that she would only do what Rishi said and so on. And it seemed really unhealthy, this 14 year old girl who was totally controlled by her 21 year old boyfriend and everyone just accepted it. But reading all those details again, after having just read Meena Kumari’s biography and some other stuff, it probably saved her. Rishi adopted her as a little sister right from the start of her adult career and then moved on to boyfriend and made sure everyone knew she was off-limits and kept her safe until she was old enough to marry him. In his own obsessive controlling terrifying way.
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Katrina has the accent. There’s a reason why she hasn’t given it up. She’s still in the foren actor/item girl mode. She has a Helen like clout but not beyond that.
Rishi and Neetu, well, it was probably sweet. A boyfriend who doesn’t care about your whereabouts is a fuckboi even today.
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