She has come a long way sinceJassi Jaissi Koi Nahi and is ready to take on a new space, the web series, as part of TVF’s Yeh Meri Family. Shambhavi Suri gets talking to the actress
As the scorching heat reigns over Delhi, one misses the good-old days of the early 90s when families, despite the goodies of liberalisation, still sat together. For something as simple as savouring mangoes. For kids, summer was about outdoor games and for mothers a troublesome time as they ran around the house. To relive nostalgia from three decades ago, and symbolically hoping to relearn a few lessons, The Viral Fever has announced a new web-series on YouTube, Yeh Meri Family, starring Mona Singh and Akarsh Khurana.
Singh, best known for her lead role in Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahi, plays the mother. “On TV, a mother is still portrayed as very sweet and sugar-coated, who is forever indulgent. But the difference here is that I am playing a believable, real-life one. Back in the 90s, we used to get shouted, scolded and not treated with kid gloves. Our parents were disciplinarian but not over-indulgent. And they were just as caring and loving. They made us understand the worth of things and work towards it. Nowadays, parents just dump everything in excess, be it affection or gifts, like reward points. For this role, I referenced my mother and I tried to get an essence of that in my acting,” she says.
The web series, set in the summer of 1998, “is taking the audience back to the pre-cellphone age, when Govinda songs were a rage and family time was all about eating mangoes together, even going out to a dhaba for a good meal,” she tells us, hoping she can take the viewer on a trip down memory lane. In the process, she hopes people will appreciate the emotional heft of family relationships that are increasingly under strain these days.
The actress has come a long way since her first role in the Indian adaptation of Ugly Betty and has gone on to play mature characters in movies like 3 Idiots, Kya Huaa Tera Vaada and won the dance reality show Jhalak Dikhla Ja.
She doesn’t mind playing mother, since that is one role that can be played over and over again with discernible layers of complexity, conflict and empathy.“Three of my co-actors were kids. On the sets, I would become one of them and play all sorts of silly games like hide and seek. On the other hand, Akarsh, who is a very funny man, used to keep cracking jokes all the time. We shot for almost 40 days for seven episodes and it never felt like we were working. It was always party-time. That’s when I realised the importance of connecting with family, no matter what the time or context,” she says.
Working with TVF for the first time, the 36-year-old says she was inspired by all “very creative people, who write inspiring stories, which get brilliantly translated by the director. I believe that these are the type of stories that need to be told and unfortunately lack takers on TV.”