Vidya Balan, On The Road Less Travelled

She rode the high, and has learnt to coast the lows. Vidya Balan tells Shubarna Mukerji Shu that she will do what she likes to do, and only what she enjoys doing! The reins are back in her lovely hands…

- Shubarna Mukerji Shu

When you have ridden the high, touched the skies are now beating the air beneath your wings to soar once more, are you patiently waiting your turn or are you grinning at those who don’t know what will hit them next? Well, Vidya Balan is doing a bit of both, poised to soar, waiting to stun. What gets my heart is that she is honest enough to agree, she knows something that we haven’t even dreamt of…

For so much that life has been over the last decade and more, which do you remember as your most memorable moment of pure ecstasy?

It has to be the first time I saw myself on television, Thursday – 8.30, ‘Hum Paanch’. I was atrocious but it felt wonderful. I had done a series before that which never got showcased. So that moment when I saw myself, I felt like I had arrived!

Later, when we screened Parineeta in Amsterdam, after the screening all the people I had once just seen from afar – filmmakers, producers, actors - all came up to me and congratulated me. It was a moment that shocked me and yet, somewhere deep down, I knew it would happen like that. My father and sister were in the audience at the press conference and my sister actually said that I was so comfortable answering the questions of the media, as if I were to the manner born. But I always knew I had it in me - I am not being pompous but I knew something that the world now knows.

Though you knew you had it in you, did you ever guess the magnitude of adulation you would enjoy? And in this path, have there been any moments in your life, when you found yourself thinking about times that were your ‘highs’ which you didn’t fully comprehend at that moment…