When Urvashi mistook her mother for a ghost!
TV actors share their scariest experiences with BT
RESHMA S KULKARNI
Amongst the many bitter-sweet experiences that one encounters in life, there are some that play on your psyche and literally psyche you out! There comes a
moment in life when your heart is in your mouth and you're scared to the bone. That experience is something that one is unlikely to forget for a long time.
As Ami Trivedi recollects, "I had always been a forerunner in school; the studious, bookish kind who would top all her exams. So naturally, there would be this urge to excel each time. But once, during my SSC prelims, it so happened that I burnt the midnight oil preparing Geography lessons for the next day's paper, only to come into the examination hall and hear that the Geography paper was scheduled on some other day! I had copied down the timetable wrongly! Can you imagine how scared I was? I was thinking of every possiblity from me failing in the prelims to being asked to withdraw from my exam. I was very scared but finally, to cut a long story short, I managed to pass in both the papers and also passed my board exams with flying colours."
Gaurav Gera too has a school-related experience to narrate. "I was in the sixth standard and had been selected for a big elocution competition for which my mother had helped me prepare for weeks and I had learnt the speech to the extent that I could also narrate it in my sleep. But on the D-day, I simply don't know what happened; I was super-confident till I went on the stage, belted out the first sentence with aplomb and then, poof ! I went blank! I could not remember a word and was simply staring at the audience till the time-out was announced. Of course, my parents and others were really understanding and supportive; after all, it was just a simple competition but that is one instance that I vividly remember as the scariest one for me, with everyone waiting with bated breath to see what I could do. The unspoken expectations weighed down heavily on me, that day."
For Urvashi Dholakia and Swapnil Joshi, their scariest experiences were in tandem with their phobias. Urvashi confesses, "I have a phobia of darkness; I simply have to sleep with the lights on, much to the consternation of my friends or cousins who join me for sleepovers. But once, a couple of years back, I had a cousin staying with me overnight and I decided to get brave and switch off the lights. What's more, instead of sleeping with my face towards the door of my bedroom (another habit of mine), I chose to sleep with
my face towards
the wall.
Somewhere late in the night, my cousin drifted off to sleep while chatting and I was about to follow suit, when, I saw an image of a woman on the wall, with her long hair flying with the breeze and I screamed my lungs out, waking my poor cousin up and scaring my poor mother who has this really bad habit of tiptoeing into my room to check on me! It sounds really funny while talking about it now but it was too scary for me!"
Swapnil, on the other hand, who has a phobia of reptiles, had to go through a two day self-confessed ordeal of 'handling a snake! "Can you imagine what must have become of me? I was this 17-year-old guy, shooting for Shri Krishna and there was this sequence that required me to hold a live snake and show a lot of nonchalance and bravado on my face when, from within I was going numb with fear. What's more, the unit guys who knew about my phobia decided to scare me all the more and did not tell me that the snake's fangs had been removed. All the while, I kept worrying sick that the snake would bite me, not to mention the gross feeling I had while handling the poor thing for two days. I went ballistic when I later realised how these guys had pulled my leg. I still get teased for that but I still am equally phobic about reptiles" confesses Swapnil.
Mrinal Kulkarni has an interesting experience to narrate whilst she was trekking at the Rajgad fort in the Sahyadris. "The place is a trekker's paradise for its challenging topography and there was this one time when we got a bit too adventurous and ventured to a place where there were enormous beehives. We were warned not to go ahead but we ignored the warning and forged ahead without realising that someone had been smoking close to that place earlier, due to which the bees had swarmed out in droves. And man, did they attack us or what! Till then I had only heard about a bee-attack but it was the scariest experience I have had till date" shudders Mrinal.
But the most uniquely scary experience comes from Tarun Khanna – "It was while I was watching the movie Titanic for the first time. Being a movie buff, I get completely involved in the movies I watch and whilst watching Titanic, the only thought that kept recurring in my mind was that 'What if I was over there, with my son and wife?' It was too horrifying a thought to imagine. I mean, you are against nature that doesn't spare anybody from its wrath, irrespective of who you are and more so, when you are fighting against water, I believe it's a lost fight. The helplessness of a human being, who has progressed so much but has not been able to shield himself from the wrath of nature, scared me to my bones!"
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Bigg Boss 19
