shweta tiwari

Shweta Tiwari, aka Prerna of Kasauti Zindagi Kay, lets her hair down as Kavita in her first Hindi play, Sharaarat. In be tween prancing around and doing comedy, she talks about her off-screen persona, her catty remarks against her co-stars Cezanne Khan (Anurag/Kasauti Zindagi Kay) and Ronit Roy (Mr Bajaj/Kasauti...) and about life in general.

In a tight, black T-shirt and jeans teamed with a maroon cardigan, Shweta looks feminine and gives no-nonsense answers to controversial questions: does she stand by the comment she made on Kandy Floss, the gossip show, that "Sankraman studios mein bahut saare kutte hain" when asked, "What are your comments on Cezanne?"

"You know," says Shweta, "when they first asked me, I said, 'Cezanne who?' But they were not ready to buy that. They switched off the camera and for half an hour they kept asking me to make some comment. So, I said, 'Fine, switch on your camera and I will tell you what you want.' The actress describes herself as "a very straightforward person. If I don't like somebody, I tell them to just back off. I can't back bite and I don't gossip."

What about the recent report of her showdown with Ronit Roy, whom she reportedly punched in the stomach because he insisted on playing Holi with her? "I had about five scenes to shoot as I had to leave for Sri Lanka the next morning. Ronit wanted to play Holi with everybody. I told him, 'Just a little gulal on my face', but he insisted on smearing me with a lot of colours, which I had to wash off with great difficulty.

"Now, when somebody forcibly plays Holi with you, what do you do? I just pushed him away, but certainly didn't punch him. Can anybody really punch somebody just like that? Those who reported that bit of news chose to write what suited them.

"In this industry and on every TV set, you have these so-called common friends and 'sources' who want to please everybody. They would say something about me and something about him and things would get blown out of proportion. In this industry, you know how men greet women -- they touch you, hug you and insist on kissing you. I don't like it and I say so, but there are some who won't listen and that's when I lose it. They call it attitude and I'm fine by it."

Does she have friends in the industry? "Except Ronit and Cezanne, everybody is a friend," she guffaws. Shweta, who has a daughter from her love marriage, says about her husband, "He knows me inside out. We are constantly in touch with each other and he knows everything I do or say. So it doesn't matter what the others think of me. My daughter, Palak, is my world. I'd rather go home and spend time with her than party. I live my life the way I want to. Take it or leave it."

On her play Shweta plays Kavita, a young woman forced to share a hotel room with Kunal Mittal (Vinay Jain) in Sharaarat, opening this Sunday at Manik Sabagriha. Initially, they can't stand each other, but then a relationship develops. "I liked the fact that I would do comedy for the first time," says Shweta. "After living as Prerna for so long, it's a pleasure to be Kavita. She dresses the way I do and she also loves to laugh. The difficult part is to make everybody laugh. Fine, I'm ready for it."