Covering Bollywood and the Hindi Cinema

Shilpa Shetty is in the news once again and as usual not for her Bollywood career (or whatever is left of it). The leggy lass in an interview to UK’s Daily Mail admitted that she is dating a British Indian but refused to reveal his name. However Daily Mail  figured out that its none other than Raj Kundra.

Excerpts from the interview:

"I am dating somebody," says Shilpa, shyly. "I have known him for some time but I have only just started to know him better.

"I hope he will be the one but I don't want to say too much because it is still very early on in our relationship."

It is pretty clear that the man in question is Raj, a London-born entrepreneur, who, it is claimed, has made a fortune with jewellery and film businesses here and in India - although few formal records of his wealth exist in this country.
I'm not going to deny that it's him but please don't say it is because I don't want to frighten him off," she says.

It is a slightly puzzling sentiment. Raj does not look like a man who will be frightened away. He arrives with Shilpa when we meet, and is there to take her away afterwards. Their body language is unmistakably intimate.

"He respects and understands what I do and it is nice to be cared for," she says. "I have been very lonely for a very long time and it is nice to know I have somebody to look forward to seeing at the end of the day. At last I feel normal.

"It has been an incredible year for me but I have also been very lonely. I have been away from home, in a foreign country and I haven't had a boyfriend for a very long time.

"I need someone to woo me. Magazines are always saying I am beautiful and millions of men want to woo me, but none has come forward because they are all so scared.

"I can go to a party and sense that men really like me but they are in awe of me and won't come and ask me for a date. Being an Indian actress is bad enough but now I'm a celebrity in the UK it's too much. It would take a really secure man to handle the media attention.

"I'm eulogised by a lot of men, but they wouldn't take me home to meet their mothers."

But there may be other reasons for Shilpa's caution, reasons that go beyond the natural modesty expected of Hindu women.

Raj's former wife Kavita has publicly accused Shilpa of helping break up their marriage. She claimed her husband had become so obsessed with Shilpa that reconciliation was impossible, and even that they had started an affair.

Shilpa denies all impropriety. But sexual shenanigans are not encouraged in a Bollywood goddess, and the mere accusation is potentially awkward for her reputation.

"I was really upset by what she said," says Shilpa. "She knew very well that I didn't even know her husband when she walked out on him.

"I didn't even know him when I went into Big Brother. I have known him for about only six months, which was four months after his wife had left home and he had already got a divorce by then."

This is not the only occasion she has been mixed up in romantic speculation; she has learned her caution the hard way. In 2005, she was said to have become close to Bollywood director Anubhav Sinha. He left his wife shortly afterwards. In this case, too, Shilpa has been adamant there was no wrongdoing.

She is more forthcoming about her relationship with Bollywood heartthrob Akshay Kumar. They went out for two years when she was in her 20s, despite her parents' disapproval, and she admits he broke her heart.

"It was a very low time for me. I did love him and I did want to marry him and I lost out on a lot of work because people thought we were getting married. I used to be so vulnerable-and naive and it took that experience to make me wake up."

The episode taught her a great deal about taking control of events. "Everything I have achieved so far and the person I am today is down to that relationship ending," she concludes.

Shilpa may have been unknown here before Big Brother, but in India she was already a household name, with more than 40 films on her CV.