Katrina Kaif

By Jilawatan

Forget her firang twang, Katrina Kaif will now speak chaste Hindi in Raajneeti. At least her trainer thinks so and is extremely satisfied with the effort she put in to get her accent right. Bollywood acting trainer and director of Kreating Charakters acting institute, Vidur Chaturvedi, taught Kaif to speak Urdu in only 20 days!
He says, “Yash Raj Films called me for her voice and diction training for the film New York. When I went through the script, I realised that her accent was a plus point and in fact, helped develop her character as an NRI. She didn’t need to be a Meena Kumari or a Madhubala. But for Raajneeti, she needed to speak differently.”
Short time
Since they had very little time before she went off shooting, Vidur simply recorded the dialogues and Kaif would perfect them later. He says, “She already knew the Hindi alphabets, but these days, you get dialogues in Roman script. I’d go train her in the evening and she’d work on her diction from 8 to 11 at the night. In the end, she had mastered all the dialogues. She never missed a class.” He warns that one may still catch the twang in her regular conversations, but as far as the film is concerned, she got the nuances of Hindi right.
Vidur has been a trainer in the industry for over 20 years now and had come to Mumbai mainly to become a director. He joined an acting school and even directed a Marathi film called Bhakti Heech Khari Shakti, but can’t think of taking up acting as a profession. He plans to make a Bollywood film soon. “I can teach Shakespeare, but I can’t be Shakespeare,” he draws an analogy. He prefers word-of-mouth publicity. “Anil Kapoor called me to train his daughter Sonam Kapoor. He said Neetuji (Neetu Kapoor) recommended my name to him. That’s how it works for me,” Vidur informs.
His list of students is an impressive milieu of Bollywood stars: Saif Ali Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Ranbir Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Kareena Kapoor, Genelia D’Souza, Soha Ali Khan, Arjun Rampal, Minissha Lamba, Jacqueline Fernandes, Imran Khan and more. He quickly mentions his not-so-famous students too. “I’ve trained others like Kishen Kumar, Monica Bedi, Luv and Kush Sinha. Even though their films have bombed, my duty as a trainer is to own up to their flops too,” he asserts.

By Jilawatan

If a poll was conducted asking which Bollywood actress is most suited to play Alice in the desi version of ‘Alice In Wonderland’, we’re sure Katrina Kaif would win hands down. But director Shashanka Ghosh, who made the delightful and quirky Quick Gun Murugun, hasn’t yet finalized the leading lady of his adaptation of the famous book by Lewis Carroll.

Katrina Kaif, Sonam Kapoor and Soha Ali Khan are reported to be under consideration for the role.

Ghosh will contemporize ‘Alice In Wonderland’ into an Indian setting. Alice of the book will become Alisha in the movie. While Ghosh plans to stay loyal to the book in his adaptation, he would add another character of a school teacher (modeled on the book’s author) in the movie.

The director hasn’t yet finalized the leading actress but he wants someone who is “sexy” and has “childlike bewilderment”.

The movie will have lots of special effects and Ghosh wants to make it at a par with international fantasy flicks like ‘Harry Potter’ movies or ‘The Lord of the Rings’.

Alice In Wonderland is the story of a bored girl who follows a rabbit through a burrow and falls right down through a tunnel into another world where she shrinks to a smaller size and later turns into a giant. She meets several strange animals and creatures in this magical world.