By Hindustan Times
Well, I ASSUMED to myself because the car swung into the drive of the Juhu hotel during which I USED TO BE scheduled to fulfill my interviewee, well, that is unprecedented.
I have written about a wide variety of people, you see, from Nobel Prize winners to champion sportsmen, from criminals to beauty queens, but never have I written about someone who has modelled for Playboy magazine. Moreover, I HAVEN'T first made acquaintance with someone’s unclothed photographs at the internet, and only then met that somebody in person for the primary time.
But it is a unique interviewee in every kind of the way. Sherlyn Chopra, 25, is the primary Indian to have modelled naked for Playboy. She is the primary Indian to have put out at the social networking site, twitter, naked photos that show her frolicking on the Playboy Mansion within the company of the mighty mag’s formidable team of stylists, photographer and inventive directors. EVERY WEEK once I meet her, she is going to become the primary person I DO KNOW of to carry a press conference, within the packed auditorium of a five-star hotel, to proclaim how comfortable she is in her skin, and the way she's going to be the primary Indian to grace the magazine’s cover. (Playboy officially neither confirms nor denies the bit in regards to the cover, while conceding that it was a “delight” to work with her.)
In this unfolding real-time reality show, the role of the web in general, and twitter in particular, can't be overemphasised. Twitter is where – as we all know – Sherlyn first posted her pictures. Twitter is the platform she is using to converse with people. And it's where she is being subjected to a barrage of abuse.
In the brief time that the photographs were on twitter (Playboy asked her to take them down), hindustantimes.com managed to get them and put them up at the website. The photos went viral.
The evening before I met Sherlyn, two things happened. Another nude photo leaked on twitter. Questions were raised about whether this was the image she had sent to Playboy as a part of her portfolio. And Hugh Hefner, the 86-year-old founding father of Playboy, tweeted: ‘Bollywood starlet Sherlyn Chopra would be the first Indian to look nude in Playboy, within the November issue.’ Ah, confirmation.
When we meet within the hotel suite, Sherlyn is in a black top, ripped jeans, and suede boots with pencil heels. A YSL belt with an outsized buckle cinches her waist.
Once our photo shoot is over, I ask her about how shooting for Playboy was different from – with the exception of within the most blatant way – other shoots she has done. “Oh, it was probably the most fun time I'VE had in my life. We'd start at 10.30am after some Jack Daniels and vodka. Never have I done a shoot with such confidence and joy. The ambience made me feel comfortable.” Our shoot was a little less adventurous, and, manifestly less fun.
Before the interview, I had reread in Martin Amis’s The Moronic Inferno the essays on Hefner and Hefnerland. “The man-made, bloodheat rockpool, the jacuzzi -infested grotto, the mini-zoos with their hunched, peanut-addict monkeys…“ Like other interviewers, , Amis points out that Hefner never rises before mid-afternoon. “No,” Sherlyn says. “No. I saw him once within the morning?” She has acquired – or has always had, like many young, urban Indians – the Valley Girl lilt, the imperative to show an announcement right into a question. When she talks about Hefner, her tone turns reverential.
She met Hefner the day after she arrived on the Mansion. “I was told that Mr Hefner loves to see a girl wearing essentially the most feminine way possible.” This must presumably be when Hefner formally meets them in person for the primary time, because, by all accounts, he prefers them undressed and splayed in as some ways possible in his magazine and DVDs. “I desired to wear a jumpsuit, nevertheless it was suggested that I wear a brief dress or a night gown.”
She selected the quick dress. Then they played dominoes. “We all needed to put money at the table for the sport? Mr Hefner put $5 at the table on my behalf. And that i lost.” It seems like a terrible betrayal of confidence.
Playboy, and appearing in it, was much on Sherlyn’s mind over time. In 2009, she had sent the magazine her photographs. She were asked to turn up for a tribulation. “I panicked and didn’t go. I didn’t know if I’d have the ability to do it, if I’d be capable of get back and live here on this country.”
So what changed within the intervening three years? Was desperation added to ambition to take inhibition out of the equation? She thinks for a very long time about phrase her answer. “Earlier I USED TO BE afraid of my folks in Hyderabad? About what folks would say… Something changed after Big Boss [the truth TV show that she entered and was evicted from in 2009]. I ENDED worrying about people; I BEGAN thinking that I'D be answerable only to myself.”
Which is something you had better persist with doing when many of us on twitter are asking you: “You are a whore. How much do you charge per night?” Sherlyn started by responding to the abuse. Now she simply lets or not it's. How does she feel about it? She answers, but later texts back precisely what she had meant when she said what she had said: “If total freedom comes with the perceived notion of being a whore, then so be it.”
Today, she is known. (OED: ‘famous’– adjective; known about by many of us) But famous is something she has desired to be for plenty of years, and something she have been striving for. When she was young, her parents fought so much. She grew up amid domestic violence. Then, they separated. She was, she says, “always a daddy’s girl”. Her father kicked the bucket in 2005. That may be when she left Hyderabad for Mumbai. “I desired to escape. It wasn’t easy to live with my mother under one roof.”
What has her mother needed to say concerning the turn her life has taken? “I haven’t spoken to her. The last I spoke to her was on May 7.” (She went to La for the shoot on July 2.) Her sister, a DJ in Hyderabad, have been supportive. “She always encouraged me to be a go getter.”
Which is what she tried to be in her first, struggling years in Mumbai. It wasn’t easy.
There isn't any count of the Bollywood aspirers who happen a week in Mumbai, who happen within the city of dreams, and stick with it dreaming. There's no count either of these who, when their dreams are shattered, change into husks of themselves. But then, without ambition, without the dreaming, without that stroke of luck to back talent, where would anyone be?
Sherlyn acted in a couple of low-budget films. She modelled. She put out her own line of merchandise. She got nowhere. She sits back, shuts her eyes and massages her temples when she remembers those times. “It was essentially the most painful a part of my life. I USED TO BE vulnerable. I took whatever work came my way. I got serious about messed up, partially abusive relationships.”
She also got caught in a vicious cycle. “I did B-list films because I couldn’t find A-list ones. After which once I approached A-list directors with the experience I had gained, I USED TO BE told that it was too late because I had done B-list films.” And the years were slipping by.
Sherlyn Chopra
Until now. If only time might be frozen at this instant. Unless what's to follow is more remarkable. There's the money, in fact. She won’t say how much, but does speak of the way much she covets money. “Power derives from money. I always desired to make some huge cash on my own, to have power from that.” There'll be promotions back in Los Angeles, and DVDs and appearances at events.
Writing in 1985, Amis said a Playboy Playmate of the Year on the time got “$100,000, a brand new car (not a pink Porsche or a crimson Cadillac but a dinky black Jaguar), and the title itself”. Sherlyn isn't a Playmate. Hers is without doubt one of the series of “celebrity pictorials” – the phrase utilized by Playboy’s publicity department – the magazine features.
Playboy didn't say what appearing in a single of these fetches. But as with cricketers who play for India, the actual money isn't within the one shoot, however the endorsements and promotional work that the shoot engenders. After I got involved with Playboy’s publicity department last week, I USED TO BE told that it was too early to cite them at the matter. It seemed as if it might be best that I don’t quote them on not with the ability to quote them.
Soon after, though, seeing the extent of interest in Sherlyn on this a part of the world, Playboy’s (money)wise women and men might well have understood that the problem could also be worth milking very quickly. The web site put out a promo for Sherlyn: “Coming soon to Playboy Magazine and Playboy.com, a historic nude pictorial of Bollywood sensation Sherlyn Chopra, the primary Indian woman to look within the magazine.”
So this, for Sherlyn, might be the start of a slightly different career from the only she envisaged when she arrived in Mumbai. She says that the burlesque artist, Dita Von Teese, is making an adult film, and he or she has made her interest within the project known. The adult movie industry – lucrative but fragile – is also a technique to move. Other options tend to appear.
In The Post Office Girl, the posthumously published, harrowing masterpiece concerning the power of cash by the Austro-Hungarian author, Stefan Zweig, the novel’s heroine, Christine – a wretchedly impoverished, provincial girl who works within the local post office – travels to urbane Vienna. There, she sees the moneyed people swanning about in expensive shops and restaurants. “They’re the same, she thought. There’s not much between us. There’s some way up somewhere, somewhat step to climb, you’ve just got to seek out it.”
Sherlyn has found that way. She has climbed that step. From here, the vista appears filled with allure. What she does with those prospects, and what people who find themselves empowered to bring those prospects to fruition do with her, will define the following chapter of her story.
