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Ad guru Prahlad Kakkar, who witnessed the rise of Priyanka Chopra from a beauty pageant winner to a Bollywood star, said that he always had his money on her even though others were predicting that Lara Dutta would break out between the two of them. It was the same scenario as Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen, he said in a new interview, as he recalled what a tenacious person Priyanka was. Prahlad said that Priyanka never compromised on her dignity, even when she was being written off in the film industry, and when the entire world was talking about her rumoured affair. While the name of the person whom her affair was with was edited out, it was widely rumoured in the mid-2ooos that she was seeing Shah Rukh Khan.
Describing Priyanka as ‘a doll’, Prahlad told Vickey Lalwani in an interview, “She’s a great person to work with. She’s very ambitious, she’s very single-minded, very focused. And she has a certain sense of dignity which she will not allow people to enter. Her whole so-called affair with… She never made a comment on it. Everybody else was commenting. She never said a word. She held her dignity.” He added, “If it was a frivolous relationship, she would have laughed. Obviously it was serious. It was very personal to her. She didn’t want it to be written about, she didn’t want it to be talked about.”
He said that he ‘always knew’ that Priyanka would edge past Lara Dutta eventually, after the two were pitted against each other at the start of their careers. “Priyanka had huge disadvantages at that time. Firstly, she was dark. Secondly, she had bad skin. She still does. Her skin had to be made-up and covered. She was a strong-looking girl. She lost a lot of weight to look like the way she did in Dostana. She looked like a million dollars in Dostana. She worked damn hard at it, because she’s not a delicate looking girl. She’s a big-boned girl,” he said.
Continuing to praise her, he said that it was Priyanka’s grit and determination that helped her switch base from Bollywood from Hollywood when the going got tough for her. “When the industry decided that she was too old for young heroines, she was the first Indian heroine to move abroad and make it there. Who takes that kind of risk? You’re getting bit roles, you’re getting parts, you’re not top of the line anymore, and you decide, ‘F**k it, I’m going to restart my career’,” he said.
In an earlier appearance on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Priyanka said that she quit Bollywood because she was being cornered by certain powerful forces in the industry. “I was being pushed into a corner in the industry (Bollywood). I had people not casting me, I had beef with people, I am not good at playing that game so I kind of was tired of the politics and I said I needed a break,” she said.
Last year, Shah Rukh’s old associate, producer Vivek Vaswani, defended him against the long-standing rumours. “From the time I have known him, he has been a one-woman man all his life. How many flings have you heard of? We have had one rumour of Priyanka Chopra, that also its a rumour but what else have we heard of Shah Rukh? Nothing. He’s not that kind of a person,” he said in an interview with Siddharth Kannan.
Neither Priyanka nor Shah Rukh has ever publicly addressed these rumours, although they’ve made rare comments about each other over the years. Asked during the promotions of her show Citadel about Shah Rukh’s disinterest in moving to Hollywood like her, she said, “Comfortable is boring to me. I am not arrogant, I am self-assured. I know what I am doing when I walk onto a set. I don’t need the validation of executives. I am willing to take auditions, I am willing to work. I do not carry the baggage of my success in one country when I walk into another country.”
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