KARISMA KAPOOR
She Is Here To Stay

“I am no runaway bride,” she guffaws. “When I get married you will know about it.” This coming from Karisma Kapoor at a time when the media is speculating ‘will she, won’t she’ is a positive statement.

And it does looks like as though with Dharmesh Darshan’s Haan Maine Bhi Pyaar Kiya (HMBPK) opposite real-life love Abhishek Bachchan will be a catharsis in the long relationship.

Says Darshan… “Karisma and Abhishek really are a made for each other couple on the screen as well as in the real life. This made my job even tougher that while I had to direct them in those scenes of bickering and spurts of passion. I feel that there wouldn’t have been a better pair than Abhishek and Karisma to play the character of a boy who has grown into a man, and a female who is a perfect amalgamation of a girl and a woman respectively.”

But come what may, Karisma is sure that marriage with her love is not immediately on the cards. “Why, I have just done the muhurat of a Suneel Darshan film Mere Jeevan Saathi, I completed a film each with Boney Kapoor – Shakti and Dharmesh Darshan – Haan Maine Bhi… and am working with Indra Kumar in his next venture. I also have plans to work with Shyam Benegal and Madhur Bhandarkar in their films. So where does marriage come into the picture now?” she asks about whether she has decided to tie the knot with her jeevan saathi.

How does she think such rumours came out? “The fact is that I have not been doing too much tomtomming about my achievements like other heroines. They are doing all that. Moreover there is someone who is trying to spread such rumours. When I dropped out of Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke, they said that I was getting married. I also dropped out of another film and got a similar response. So I am used to this now. The media even specified various dates for my marriage, but none of them are true,” she emphasizes.

Lolo is sure that she would come out in the open and shout from rooftops about her marriage. “I will tell everyone about it. I come from a respectable family of the Kapoors and will not run away and get married.”

Being a Kapoor has been no easy task for this talented actress. They say that, “It’s so fortunate to be a star son or daughter. You don’t have to strive for success, it happens to fall in your lap”. But the queen of Bollywood and the grand daughter of legendary Prithvi Raj Kapoor, Karisma Kapoor completely denies the statement.

Karisma had started off as a performer in Dr D Rama Naidu’s Prem Qaidi, in which made a decent, though not a great debut. But the industrious girl never lost confidence in herself and persevered with the work, no matter whether it was a cheap sarkhailo khatiya number with Govinda or a moving national award winning role of Nisha in Dil To Pagal Hai.

“Whatever I am today, is all due to my hard work. I have been castigated for various things, but I have kept moving on. I have not let controversies or anything else bog me down. I have been emotionally disturbed at times, at jibes that people including the media have had at me, but that has not deterred me from continuing with my work. The role that I took on in Dil To Pagal Hai was one rejected by me much earlier. It did a full circle went to everyone, and came back to me. I took it on and I got the national award,” she says unabashedly.

The fact that Karisma has been able to take on challenges has also worked in the girl’s favour. Taking on deglamourised roles in films like Fiza and Zubeida, Karisma has proved that she could act and how! It is a different issue that she lost out on the national award to Raveena Tandon last year.

“I plan to do offbeat films regularly. I want to do such films, which give me a sense of satisfaction. When I started doing such roles, people asked me whether I was mad. But I wanted to do such roles at the peak of my career. I did not want to do offbeat films at a time when my career was sliding down like many others do. Let me do these films when I am peaking. It is true that I have not have many releases recently, but then I have had hits like Ek Rishta The Bond of Love and Aashiq has only flopped. So I am happy with the way my career is going.”