I am no fan of actress Mallika Sherawat's acting. But I have to admit that the woman's heart is in the right place. She is vocal about women's rights and is one of the few actresses to publicly take a stand on contentious issues. She has also clearly cracked the personal marketing code to continuously keep appearing in news headlines, both in India and abroad. But what is the deal with her shifting English accent?
She recently appeared on the CNN to talk to Piers Morgan about why she is so outspoken about women's rights in India. The clip was duly shared by her on Twitter on Thursday. That she was described on the story slug as a 'Bollywood Megastar' is testimony to her growing clout outside India. Either that or an intern is going to be fired tonight after Rajinikanth fans pick up on the story.
The clip Morgan played was an old viral where she is seen yelling at a journalist for questioning her decision to speak outside India about endemic gender issues. Her accent is purely Indian and her tone is of an evangelist.
"I think you need to do your homework well. Because I said Indian society is regressive for women. With female foeticide, infanticide happening almost on a daily basis, with gangrape making the headline of newspapers, with honour killings, 40 per cent of Indian women are married below the age of 18, I think it's a very, very regressive state for women. And I stand by it," she told the journalist. There was no sophisticated rolling of the R's in that clip. She was battle-ready, as only Indians are when they sense the shopkeeper is duping them out of Rs 20.
When Morgan expressed his surprise at the outburst, Sherawat replied: "The journalist was asking me to keep quiet about something that I feel passionate about. They think when I am vocal about it, I'm giving India a bad name at international platform. Now I think that not doing anything about it, not taking a stand on it is as much a problem. I love my country (khuntry)," Sherawat said in what can only pass as very bad American accent of someone who's new to America and wants to get to know everyone and do EVERYTHING!
It's understandable when Indian stars speak to foreign correspondents with an accent before their films get released worldwide. It's one way of connecting to a wider audience and one that will be more forgiving at the time of box office returns when they can identify with a foreign speech.
Actor Irrfan has a strange accent in The Amazing Spiderman and Aishwarya Rai is also known to pick up an American accent when she is working in the United States for promotional campaigns or films.
But for Sherawat, and specifically in this instance, it's baffling why she would wear her pride in her country openly and yet force herself to speak in that awful accent just to be accepted. It's sad because she made a lot of sense and would have been taken a lot more seriously had she stated her points simply and clearly with dignity.
The issues she was talking about affect hundreds of thousands of women in India, most without access to basic rights. But the moment Sherawat begins to speak, you are distracted from what she is saying. Indian pride is partly also in the cloyingly annoying way we masticate our words, eh Mallika?
This isn't the first time either. In an interview with the Variety magazine she speaks in her patent 'foreign' accent. Only in this case she switches off midway and lapses into Indian English. The result is a hilariously complicated mashup.
Why Mallika, why? ####
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