Ruhani Sharma is in a euphoric mood, and with good reason. She couldn’t have asked for a better debut than as Anjali in Chi La Sow . It wasn’t an easy start for her though, she shares. Ruhani’s parents live in Himachal Pradesh and she has made Mumbai her home. When nothing materialised from various auditions she gave four years ago, she resorted to doing a few advertisements; the one with Deepika Padukone fetched her a lot of attention. Ruhani is frank about why the auditions didn’t work for her: “I knew I wasn’t ready and decided that only when I get the confidence I should begin my hunt. I kept attending acting workshops and never gave up.” The producers of Chi la Sow insisted on a ‘no make-up look’ to finalise her when she came down to Hyderabad and eventually got selected for the role.
Multi-layered role
She shares, “I rehearsed a lot and memorised my lines a thousand times. For the climax scene, Rahul did not want any cut and it was a lengthy monologue. He said I should say it fast because Anjali is angry and I did just that.” There was no song and dance for Ruhani in this story, did she miss that? “I will have lot more films in future where there will be running around trees. Here the story has so many layers and it offered me so much more than I wanted; I wasn’t just a glamour doll. As for the make up, we didn’t use any as Rahul and the cinematographer had a certain vision and they wanted Anjali to be a simple girl that everyone could relate to. She is beautiful in her own way; they wanted the qualities to dominate the skin,” she describes. To a question if the character Anjali over reacted to certain situations, she has an emphatic no as an answer. Her character is not one dimensional as it appears initially, it had many layers and Rahul’s interpretation was more than convincing. Having a mother suffering from bi-polar disorder and the family not embarrassed by it led gravitas to the story. It was a combination of developing romance and reality in a span of 24 hours and what came out in the end was the goodness and earnestness of the characters.
Ruhani Sharma and Sushanth in the film
Role connect
Ruhani says her favourite person in the film is Arjun, his honesty and innocence pervades all through the story. She shares quite a few similarities with her onscreen character Anjali, “I am a middle class girl and so are my friends…I connected to her psyche. We have common traits. I am independent like her, I am mature though not as much as her. I don’t have a boyfriend as well, I used to, but not any more. Anjali is averse to trivia and a no nonsense person. She doesn’t like to make friends, wants to give all her time to her family because it is her world. I am also like her, I would do anything for my family.”
Finally she agrees that her next few films might not have a role as solid as this. She says, “But there is nothing wrong in hoping that you get equally good stories right?”
