The Original 'Aashiqui' Girl Is Back In The Spotlight

The original Aashiqui girl is back in the spotlight. An avid yoga practitioner and researcher, Anu Aggarwal, talks to Hemchhaya De about her autobiography, how she has healed herself and why she believes sex and spirituality are not in conflict.

- Hemchhaya De

A couple of years ago, a national magazine mourned that it could not reach the enigmatic Aashiqui (1990) girl, Anu Aggarwal, while deconstructing the stupendous success of Mahesh Bhatt’s boy-meets-girl film. When Rahul Roy, her co-star in the film, was asked about Anu’s whereabouts, he told the magazine then that he had no clue where the reclusive star was. Well, Anu is back now and how.

Twenty-five years after Aashiqui opened to resounding applause in theatres all over the country and following sporadic appearances after her near-fatal car crash in 1999, the former model-turned-actor released her autobiography, Anusual: Memoir of a Girl Who Came Back from the Dead, in Mumbai recently. There have been enough twists and turns in her chequered career to make her autobiography an interesting one: a selfimposed exile, the sacrifice of stardom, a fight with death, and finally, healing through yoga. Every time she was dealt a blow, Anu managed to rise from the ashes like a phoenix. As she puts it in the prologue of her book, she has realigned the pieces of her jigsaw puzzle, after getting ‘massacred by glass and metal’. So, how did she prepare herself for penning a bare-all biography? “You are a miracle. You are alive. In your condition, 10 out of 10 would have copped it,” I have heard the doctors say. But I witnessed my astounding recovery. It was unbelievable, to say the least. And I felt compelled to share it,” explains the 46-yearold. “So many people have showered me with love and so many suffer from mind-body problems each day, so a never-say-die story like this had to be shared

It wasn’t easy putting her life up for scrutiny once again, though. There was a time after