Remember that girl in high school with the easy charm, buckets of cool, and a penchant for being a bad*ss at anything she tried? Say hello to Kalki Koechlin— that girl in adult form.
Walking onto set sans entourage (unless you count her new acoustic guitar) in a flannel shirt, Kalki’s entrance may not be have been as grandiose as your average Bollywood prima donna, but it’s definitely as arresting. Spot boys amassing empty cups on trays, and the bevy of busily bustling production guys arranging outfits neatly on hangers, both stop mid-task as the coverstar walks in, easy as pie, offers the crew a comfortable hug, and heads to the dressing room, nonchalant. In those mere minutes, the tone for the day is set. As we settle down for a tête-à-tête whose languid flow will exceed our regular runtime by just a couple of hours, it becomes clear that Kalki is too many things to pack into one interview; perhaps, even, one person. She does this slew of cool-as-all-hell things— you know, when she’s not getting into the skin of a Lady Macbeth off-shoot in Rajat Kapoor’s What’s Done Is Done on stage, or a slightly bitter, lonesome Mimi from A Death In The Gunj on screen. From guest-ing on web series, to driving around the country on a motorbike in Kalki’s Great Escape—to her recent, wildly apposite poetry slam Noise that made social media waves for it’s sharp observation and piquancy. “I actually plagiarised my own work to do it!” she laughs. “I’d written this poem called We, The People and I expanded on that. It came from the fact that I used to live on Yari Road [Mumbai], that was full of competing cacophonies—from the local machchiwalis, to a mosque’s loudspeakers, to temple bells...it was this deafening chaos.”
This story is from the August 2017 edition of Cosmopolitan India.
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This story is from the August 2017 edition of Cosmopolitan India.
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