An Actress With A Difference – Bhumi Pednekar
Bhumi Pednekar stole everybody’s heart with her performance and unconventional looks in Sharat Katariya’s Dum Laga Ke Haisha. In fact, she was kept as a highly guarded secret up until the promotion of the movie, and it worked wonders for creating a lot of buzz around it.
What was most different about the movie was not that it treated Bhumi as a fat person, but rather that it treated her as a person. Let’s not forget that fact almost all movies (be it Bollywood or Hollywood) have always made fun of fat people. Slowly and steadily with increasing awareness, audiences were sensitized to not making fun of “fat” people. Even then, movies would exclusively feature fat people as a comic relief and nothing more. Seldom did it happen that obese people got roles of substance because for the film industry, they weren’t people but just “props”.
This is why Bhumi’s role in Dum Laga Ke Haisha was a breath of fresh air. The newest find of Yash Raj Films (YRF) boasted of a debut that most other actresses would shy away from. And while a lot of Bollywood divas boast of their strict diet regimes and gym schedules, Bhumi was just like us – she ate, she got fat and she enjoyed every minute of it. In fact, she had to put on additional weight for the movie, for which she ate a high calorie diet for almost a year to get to 90 kg.
And what caught the critics’ attention was not just her on-screen persona, but her off-screen sense of style was well. Apart from breaking the mould for Bollywood’s obsession with picture perfect heroines, Bhumi was making quite an impression as a fashionista as well. So while her character Sandhya wore salwar kurtas and sarees in the movie, Miss Bhumi experimented with Indian and Western wear every chance she got. And yes, she lost a lot of weight as well. So while she looked adorable as Sandhya, she looked equally eye-catching at the various awards functions and ceremonies she was photographed at. In the photo below, you can see Pednekar at the HT Style Awards 2015 in a navy blue Namrata Joshipura gown, accompanied with smokey eyes, pink lips and a sleep hairdo.
However, it looks like Miss Pednekar has made it her mission to become as slim as her contemporaries. She’s undergone a stunning transformation, as is evident by the photo below and we have to say we’re disappointed. She looked lovely as the chubby Sandhya and lovelier still when she had all those curves going for her at the various promotional events for Dum Laga Ke Haisha. Her weight was her USP and made her stand out from a sea of thin Bollywood heroines. And now? She can be as stylish as she wants and may even be able to carve a niche for herself, but we would have still loved to see her pack those kilos.
If you’re interested in reading about style evolutions, then make sure you go through Jacqueline Fernandez’ dazzling evolution
Picture courtesy- thehindu.com, missmalini.com and moviereviewpreview
