Bipasha Basu On The Man She Loves

Bipasha Basu has been living a life straight out of the movies over the last couple of months—a romantic fairytale proposal by Karan Singh Grover on New Year’s Eve in Koh Samui, a beautiful wedding that had most of Bollywood turning up, and a honeymoon in the Maldives. Celebrating her first month of married life, the Bengali beauty tells Farhad J Dadyburjor why she’s the reality check in the relationship and her short-term memory that has helped in moving on from past relationships.

- Farhad J Dadyburjor

 Life is full of little ironies. Who would have thought that Bipasha Basu would meet her future husband Karan Singh Grover on the sets of a film called nothing less than Alone. And at the biggest moment of her life when some acting skills may have helped her—what with Karan down on one knee with a ring in the other hand proposing marriage on New Year’s Eve in the beautiful surroundings of Koh Samui, Bipasha instead got extremely freaked out and blurted, “What’s wrong with you? Why do you want to marry me?!”

She laughs about this in hindsight. “I said a lot of nonsense. The first thing I said was, ‘I’m not supposed to be married! Why do you want to marry me?’ That was my reaction to his proposal! And everyone laughs about it till today. I just did not expect it, and I didn’t even think I would get married. I’ve always believed in love and the institution of marriage, and I always idolised my parents as the perfect couple who are still so much in love even now...but for me I guess I gave up hope,” she guffaws. “So I was not ready for it. And we have something so beautiful that I was a little bit deep down scared to tamper it with big words like marriage. Because it’s more about societal pressure and for the world. There are a lot of do’s and don’ts by the people around you once you’re married. And that’s something I did not want to happen. I didn’t want all that ‘Oh, when are you’ll getting married? When are you’ll having a baby?’ I didn’t want to go down that path. It had to happen organically.

“We are together because we want to be with each other. We inspire each other, we are each other’s best friend, we don’t need a third wheel to run our relationship—we are so happy and content between the two of us,” she says.