Girl, Uninterrupted

Taapsee Pannu is the underdog who has made it big in a long, zig-zag climb to the top. And she shows no signs of slowing down

- DIVYA J SHEKHAR

Taapsee Pannu doesn’t belong. Not to one industry, one language, one film family, or one Bollywood camp. And this—trading comfort to satisfy curiosity, and security to embrace the unknown—is not new to her. After all, she’s the engineer who let go of a lucrative Infosys job offer to sign a film in an unfamiliar language (Telugu); she’s the Delhi girl who moved out of her home to settle down in Hyderabad for the initial three years of her career, and she’s the performer who backed unconventional scripts that many of her contemporaries were sceptical of taking up.

“I never stay put in one place, or do just one kind of thing, because I get bored of people easily,” says the actor, seated comfortably in her vanity van that is parked inside Mehboob Studios in Mumbai. The 32-year-old admits to being a jack of all trades and a master of none, which possibly explains her quest to take on and straddle four to five different films every year. “No two characters, stories, genres—and sometimes even the languages—are the same. And that helps me enjoy going to the set every day,” she says.

The Indian film industry, particularly Hindi cinema or Bollywood, is notorious for taking pride in not guaranteeing a secure future to even the fittest who survive the rat race. Thousands of aspirants spend hours building their portfolios, attending countless auditions, tolerating failures and avoiding unscrupulous elements wanting to exploit their ambition. But most of them remain nameless, labelled merely as “strugglers” in industry parlance. Pannu could, in that sense, be a case study for what it takes for a nobody, an outsider with no industry godfather, to make it big. And not just make it big, but make it count.