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•My guest this week is a star whose laughter can light up a billion hearts. Kajol, welcome to Walk the Talk. It has taken a lot of doing. It has, it has taken you quite a lot of time as well. •Yes, I remember, at one our Screen awards functions, I walked up to you and said, 'Can I introduce myself?' And you said, 'No.' (Laughs) That sounds like me, actually. •And I said that's the one. What made you say yes (to being on this show), because I know you are very reticent about interviews. You know, we are coming out with a movie right now, U Me Aur Hum, and I heard that you were an intelligent guy and I decided to find out for myself. (Laughs) •Well, in terms of my credentials, I can say that I was absolutely in love with your mom Tanuja. So am I. (Laughs) I know she is fantastic. She really is superb. That just shows you have superb taste, by the way, when you say that you love my mom. •Does she talk to you about her movies? She does, sometimes, but not recently, no. Not all that much. I think we talk to her a lot more now than she talks to us. •Who have you taken after? Mom, grandmother, nobody? Nobody, I would like to say. But I think it's a little bit of everybody really. I can't say that it's one person. I truly believe that a child is made up of each and every one of her family, because sometimes I have people coming up to me and telling me, 'Oh my God, you look so much like Nutan!' Then I have someone telling me, 'You look so much like your mom.' And I have a third person coming up and telling me, 'Oh my God, you look so much like your dad.' •Your aunt Nutan was a great actor. But of a different type, very different from your mom. Very different. In fact, when I grew up and I was able to appreciate them as actors, it took me aback because they were so different on screen. Nutan was beautiful, and mom was like an elf. And you could never imagine they were related. My mom was spontaneous: whenever she said anything, you believed her. She was on the sets of Do Chor and was dressed as a man, and my grandmother (Shobhna Samarth) walked up and kind of nodded at her and walked off and went to the make-up room. My mom realised that her mother had not recognised her. So she took off her moustache, her get-up, and walked into the room and said, 'Hi, mom.' And my grandmother said, 'Tanu, you know I saw this boy on the sets and he looked so much like Jaideep', who was my mother's brother. My mother burst out laughing and said, 'See what a good actress I am that even my mother could not recognise me.' •She was different for her times. That was a time when everybody was so painted up. And everybody had to look the same way, and if I may say so, padded up. She was different. And you've been different as well. You set the trend of the dusky star. It didn't have much to do with dusky star . . . I just didn't let my make-up man do all that much on me. So it's just a question of laziness, rather than wanting to set a trend or hoping to make a statement of any sort. •Do you remember any mistakes you committed? Which are the films you don't really want to see? I have some real jewels in my collection. I had a film called Chal, or Hote Hote Pyaar Ho Gaya, which went on for seven years. I went through five different dress designers, two boyfriends, so that was a long odyssey. When I watch it, I literally feel, 'That was something.' Every two years, the producer would revive it and bring it out of the closet and we'd see ghosts hanging around. That's the big fat ruby. That's Kohinoor stuck up there. Then I have Takhat, a tough love story, you wouldn't even have heard of that. •Forget the forgettable ones, talk about the big ones — Baazigar, DDLJ. With Baazigar, I made a lot of friends, some of who are still my friends today. Shah Rukh Khan, Abbasbhai and Mustanbhai, their nephew Saifu. I had a blast doing the film. We never repeated that particular combination. The friends I made then were really the first friends I made. •Is that when the gang started coming into shape? The clique? I think it started a little earlier, it may have started with Baazigar. Karan (Johar), Adi (Chopra), and me were all friends. Shah Rukh came into the picture and we were generally friendly people. I believe you should work with people you trust. Sometimes you may not like the people you trust, but sometimes you may feel they are fantastic directors. I want to work with people I'll be comfortable with, at the end of the day. •Tell me some fun moments with Shah Rukh or Karan. I fell down in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, hit my head, and lost my memory for three hours. When I got my memory back, Shah Rukh said, 'You don't remember, we tried to convince you that you were a junior artiste and that you were supposed to be dancing around the tree with us.' I was like, 'You all really made me believe I was a junior artiste?' And he was like, 'We said you were a junior artiste and you really believed us.'
•And Karan
Karan and I have put our foot in it so many times it is not even funny. We have had these long conversations, happily bitching about people, and sadly the people we were bitching about have turned up in front of us. •What's this interesting equation with Karan? You're making a three-second appearance in each one of his movies. That really has nothing to do with an equation or anything like that. It's just that I think he is my friend. He would ask me to do just a three-second (shot) . . . according to him, he can't make a film without me. •You are like his good luck charm. Yes, I am, and I truly believe that. I'd be very offended if he didn't take that three-second shot with me. •You don't like anybody reading the rulebook to you. No, I don't. I have this stubborn little rebel inside me. Somebody tells me I can't do this, and I have to go out and do it. •Like what? I don't know. It's stupid things, like at boarding school the nuns used to tell me not to run in the corridors and I'd see the nun coming from the other side and I'd run down the corridor only to prove to myself that I could. Small things like that, and they carry over to bigger things. •And yet you claim that the nuns adored you. Oh yes, they loved me. They adored me. They cried a lot when I left. No, I'm lying. They cried tears of joy when I left. •You are one of the very few people I have met who said they loved being in boarding school. I loved it. I hated it for the first year. •Will you send your daughter to boarding school? I would want to. I definitely want to. I will. •The other thing that you have done. . . I know yours is a cruel world — people worry about appearance, shape, years, marital status, everything. But you've never had problems taking a break, coming back, and every time you came back, you gave a hit. I hope that just shows that I have common sense and a good script sense. •No, but have you thought this through, getting married at the peak of your career? I really am a selfish person. If you call my decisions breaking the rules . . . for one there was no rulebook I went by. Nobody told me this is what you are supposed to do. •But were you worried that this will mean a break, or that people don't like married female stars? I really didn't think like that. But a lot of people came to me and said, 'Kya kar rahi ho, picture hit ho rahi hai, this is the wrong time to get married.' But I wanted to get married, and I thought it was the right time for me, and my mom always raised me up to believe that if you take your own decision, then take the responsibility for whatever that decision entails. So I made the decision to get married, and whatever the consequences, I was okay with it. •And you came back with a big hit. Yes, I came back with a big hit. •And then you had the baby. And you came back with a big hit again. You didn't have the jitters that most female stars have, about marital status, about having a baby and coming back? No. Seriously. But maybe I haven't had the jitters because I feel I have a life beyond that. You get the jitters when you feel you have no life beyond it, my work is all I know — that's when you get the jitters. •Are you saying you can live without stardom? I don't know. Yeah, probably. Yeah, quite happily. (Laughs) •Dalai Lama? Doesn't matter if somebody takes it all away from me? No, it does matter if somebody takes it all away from me, because I feel my stardom is why I am where I am today financially, mentally also. So it has a lot to do with it. If God took it all suddenly away from me, he'd have taken a lot away from me . . . I'm not worried about stardom really, I'm worried about the little things that come with it, my financial status, my husband, my child, my family, my mental state. •From whatever I know of your husband, you two are very different people. We have very different takes on life. And I think we discuss a lot. We talk about a lot and at the same time we agree to disagree on a lot of stuff as well. And we don't only talk about work. We talk about so much else. We talk about our entire family. His entire family, my entire family, which number in the hundreds. So it's like we really have a lot to talk about. •And what do you disagree most of all on? We disagree most of all on small stuff. It's really small stuff. It's not big things. He will think very deeply about every step that he has to take. •You ever fight over what film you or he will do and with whom? Never. •I'm going by colour supplements of newspapers: you shall not act with so and so, namely Shah Rukh Khan, in this case. Never. I have to say my husband is really one progressive man in that respect.•Tell me the most stupid thing anybody said or wrote about you in the media.
think a very famous writer said I had left home, left my husband, and what a strong, fantastic woman I was for leaving my husband. There was nothing of the sort, it was completely untrue.
•So how did you handle it? We sent her a legal notice. And we both don't take any of it very seriously. What matters to us is what we believe in. It's about U Me Aur Hum actually. •So what's your new film like? U Me Aur Hum is a love story. •Mills & Boon. I believe you love Mills & Boon. I read all of that. But U Me Aur Hum is not a Mills & Boon story actually. It is what happens after a Mills & Boon, after a love story says, 'The End'. How you have to carry on. There's a lovely line in it: 'Problems are never bigger than the man.' It's the man who makes the problem big in his head and feels he cannot confront it. The problem is never bigger than the man, and as long as you can face it with a smile. . . •Always blame the man. Always. It is always the man's fault (Laughs). And we've proved it. But I hope we have made a good film. Ajay (Devgan) is a director for the first time, and he's stupendous, he doesn't feel like a first-time director. You feel he's done this 20,000 times. •Thank you, Kajol.Thank you. My pleasure, for a change.
Bindi
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