Pooja Bedi

Biography

Daughter of India's only true flower-children-couple, Pooja Bedi, in her present avatar as devoted wife, mother and now poised to becoming a writer, has probably turned out far differently from what her critics may have imagined a few years back.

As a bright, vivacious teenager when Pooja Bedi decided to take up films as her career, there was a fair amount of sniggering and disbelief. After all, both her parents had hung around long enough nd tried but apart from shocking a moralistic society with their highly unconventional lifestyle, hadn't really achieved much. It was only after Kabir went abroad and did his famous Sandokan that he began to be taken seriously. Similarly, it was only after Protima, now Gauri--after her guru, Odissi maestro, Kelucharan Mohapatra rechristened her--burrowed deep into southern India and started her unique dance school, Nrityagram, that people realised that she was built of a different metal altogether.

But while her parents followed the dictates of their own hearts, the young but tough Pooja fought her own battles in Mumbai. If she lost a few dreams in the process, she took the loss in her stride. A decade passed and with it, a lifetime of experience--a lukewarm film career, a few turbulent relationships, the marriage of her father, her own surprise marriage, a baby, the death of an only brother and finally the death of her mother last year in a landslide in the Himalayas. Enough ups and downs to make even the sanest go a little crazy.

She's turned author with two books on the anvil, Timepass and A Fit Pregnancy.