Shraddha Nigam

A ‘challenging’ debut
Her name is Shraddha Nigam. She’s related to Jeetendra, a fact that she neither flaunts nor hides. A Libran - her B-day just went by on October 1 - dancing is her hobby and acting is her passion. So, if you want to catch her living out her passion, just tune onto Sony and watch Choodiyan. The serial has Shraddha playing a very unusual role, that of a 23-year-old-girl who is mentally only eight. "No, she’s not mentally retarded," Shraddha tells you. "Call her mentally challenged," she offers instead.

To give a brief outline of Choodiyan, Rushali, played by Shraddha, has stopped growing mentally after she turned eight because of a trauma. As a kid, Rushali had hid her mother’s bangles and when asked for it had accidentally broken them. After reprimanding her, the mother had left with the father for an outing and got involved in a fatal accident.

Little Rushali is immensely shocked by her mother’s death. Connecting the bangles to her mother’s death, she becomes very sentimental about bangles and starts collecting them. Her mental growth too gets stunted. "It’s too much of a weight on the little brain and Rushali ends up carrying the emotional baggage with her for ten years," explains Shraddha who is extremely charged up about the role.

"I am a daredevil and I realised that not all projects will be like Choodiyan which happen once in a while. So, as soon as the director, Imtiaz Punjabi narrated a few scenes of the serial, I grabbed it," informs the pretty woman who initially wasn’t keen on doing television. Having grabbed the offer, Shraddha also realised that the role is no cakewalk. "I have to observe the kids to add the little nuances in my role and improvise on the character to be convincing," she explains. And yes, she’s watched Sadma five times to pick up a few guidelines and hints on the way to portray her character. "I don’t want to imitate Sridevi," tells the actresses’ die-hard fan, adding, "nobody can, because she is a great actress." However, she points out that Sadma and Choodiyan are diametrically opposite. "In Sadma Sridevi has a physical injury while in the serial, Rushali has just stopped growing due to mental blockage."
Choodiyan is the only serial Shraddha has on air right now and she prefers to keep it that way. "Not that I am closed to television but I am ambitious and want to act in commercial films," she confesses. Next week you’ll see her in the Sunil Shetty starrer Aghaaz where-in she plays his sister. "The film is a Telugu remake and having seen the Telugu film I can tell you my role has shaped out better than the one in its original," gushes the actress. But won’t she get stuck in the behenji roles, you query? "Not really because this is not the typical behen role and the film is very contemporary," she says optimistically. Isn’t that what they all say?

Anyway, in the film, she has a love angle in Akshay Anand, her romantic interest even in Choodiyan. "That was just a co-incidence," she laughs when questioned about it. Shraddha signed Aghaaz after she got Choodiyan and feels that the serial is lucky for her. She’s also bagged a role in Shah Rukh Khan’s Ashoka The Great though she’s not willing to talk about it. But so excited is she about the film that she enthuses, "I feel privileged acting with Shah Rukh Khan and Santosh Sivan at such an early stage. What else can you ask for?"

The fact that Shah Rukh Khan’s Dreamz Unlimited screen-tested models and actresses for two months before zeroing in on her is enough for Shraddha to be on "cloud nine." "They had seen one of my Ponds commercial and liked me," she beams. Shraddha is also acting in a small budget Hinglish film Take It Easy, made by a Hyderabad based V-Teme Creation. This sprightly girl has, in fact, already acted in a couple of Telugu and Malayalam films before doing Choodiyan. Her tryst with acting began with Apne Dum Par a Mithun-starrer which bombed badly. After that Shraddha went south "but nothing exciting was happening there either," she admits "till Choodiyan happened." In the mean time she started acting in Dinyaz Contractor’s play Whose Wife Is It Anyway. And now with with Aghaaz, Ashoka The Great and Choodiyan, Shraddha’s confident that her journey to fame has just begun.

Chaya Unnikrishnan


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