Ceritalah | Paying for make-up, 1am runs: life for Bollywood’s aspiring Aishwarya Rais
- Behind the mind-blowing viewing numbers, the glitz and the glamour, are people like Tanya Purohit
- When she’s not auditioning for roles, she spends her time on everything from helping students write plays to analysing professional wrestling
Thirty-year-old Tanya Purohit looks like a leading lady: slim, beautiful and fair-skinned. But what makes her special is her intelligence, warmth and wry, comedienne-like wit.
Having started out on a Delhi-based television shopping channel as a promoter and then moving on to a Mumbai sports network, the Uttarakhand-born beauty is working her way ever deeper into Bollywood’s huge M&E (media and entertainment) industry.
Andheri, the low-lying, beach-fronting suburb close to Mumbai’s Santa Cruz airport is arguably its epicentre.
Among a phalanx of high-rise apartment blocks interspersed with 1960s bungalows now converted into casting agencies, production houses, alternative performance spaces and cafes, the industry’s professionals jostle for work, contacts and advancement.
