Call Me Ananya

SHE IS HAVING A mo­ment, says Karan Johar. A massive pop culture moment. He is talking of Ananya Panday, once the subject of social media scorn and the name that launched a thousand memes on the hard life of nepo babies.

With a smart, sharply observed Prime Video series Call Me Bae, where she plays an exaggerated version of an entitled princess, Panday has captured the eat-the-rich zeitgeist and given the world a mash-up of Emily in Paris and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham’s Poo. Com­ing on the heels of Netflix’s Kho Gaye Hum Kahan (2023), where she played a social media maven who is obsessed with her life on Instagram, and soon to be followed by a dark study on technol­ogy in Vikramaditya Motwane’s ‘CTRL’, she has established herself as the lead­ing light of a new generation of female actors, such as Janhvi Kapoor and Sara Ali Khan, who have been born to the spotlight.

All of 25, Panday has grown up in front of us, her every mistake magnified and every comment scrutinised— especially her comment on her “strug­gle” in an interview which elicited the much-quoted response from fellow actor Siddhant Chaturvedi, “Jahan hamare sapne pure hote hain, wahan inka struggle shuru hota hain (Their struggle starts where our dreams are fulfilled).” Launched as a poor little rich girl in Student of the Year 2 (2019), by Johar’s production house, Panday has had a short but eventful film career so far, stumbling a bit, falling a bit, but also making wise choices that have cemented her status as the poster girl of the social media-era and burnished her credentials as an actor willing to take risks.

Panday comes from an established Mumbai family. Her grandmother Snehalata Panday was a well-known doctor. Her grandfather, cardiac surgeon Sharad Panday, has a road named in Bandra after him. Her father, Chunky, is a character actor who has had a fair share of success, while her mother Bhavana has recently become the star of Netflix’s Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives, a cringe-binge watch about the gilded lives of superstar wife Gauri Khan’s best friends.

Panday has appeared on and off in the two seasons so far. She has also negotiated the pitfalls and perils of social media with adeptness, acknowl­edging them with a mix of humour and honesty. She has had big flops such as Khaali Peeli (2020) and Liger (2022) but is able to put them behind her.

It is not easy being a young woman trying to find her groove professionally and personally in the harsh world of Mumbai cinema. Creative head at Dharma Productions Somen Mishra says it well: “At a young age, she has clarity of what she wants to do and how. I know many people think that she is doing certain kinds of urban roles where she has found her comfort but to make it look so natural is not easy at all. Like for our series Call Me Bae, nobody expected her to do comedy so well. But she is there in 95 per cent of the series and she makes it look all smooth, carrying the entire series on her shoul­ders. But behind that is a lot of work.”

Says Panday: “In a way, I see a strong reflection in my life of the judgement Bella, my character in Call Me Bae, faces. Any time she walks into a room, everyone has preconceived notions of her, that she is good for nothing. But in the show, she really does prove herself without absorbing the harshness of the world. I really like that quality about her. No matter the judgement on her, she has always remained non-judgemental, happy, earnest and sincere.” Bella begins as a South Delhi princess raised to marry into wealth, who gets tossed out by her uber rich in-laws after a sexual indiscre­tion. “Bella has grown up in a home with a lot of privileges but one that is also very regressive, with her brother lavished with all the attention,” says Panday. “She is always made to feel she can’t do much because she is a girl. She has to be the perfect daughter and the perfect wife, and that’s all, when she is actually a girl with a lot of dreams and passions,” she adds.

The heiress ends up as a hustler in Mumbai, becoming a social media journalist and uncovering a major scan­dal. The woman who has not had carbs for eight years also ends up loving vada pav on the beach with her hot boss.

Panday manages to make the most extreme acts of loneliness by Bella, such as talking to her handbags, look believable. Did she find some of the performative tone deafness of privilege too exagger­ated? Panday laughs. “There was a scene which we shot in which Bella talks to her fridge in her new downsized life in Mum­bai and the fridge doesn’t reply. It didn’t make it to the final series but I totally believed in what I was doing,” she says. It was not easy, she says. “I had to turn the energy up 100 per cent, I could never just listen, Bella is always doing something with her hands, or her eyebrows, or with her eyes. I had to constantly be on because Bella is a very reactive person. And while she is not trying to be funny, she is funny.”

Call Me Bae has much to recommend it, with its focus on sisterhood (the behen code) and the necessity of kindness. It is something she practises in her own life. She is fiercely competitive and openly ambitious but says there is more than enough work for young women looking to do something worthwhile.

Panday attributes much of the change to Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan (2022), her first “grownup” role where she was pitted against Deepika Padukone in vying for the affections of the same man, played by Siddhant Chaturvedi. Says she: “I shot Gehraiyaan when I was 21 or 22 and I was untouched by the world. Shakun taught me how to bring myself to a character, and to do a lot of research even though a character may seem very close to home. Even though you might have only a few scenes, it is very important to keep the subtext going.”

When it came to Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, her other notable film, she says her character Ahana was quite close to how she is. “Social media,”’ she says, “is a character in my life. It’s a recurring char­acter, not a constant, but it’s there, more so when I am promoting a movie or series.”

Coming up is ‘CTRL’ on Netflix— Motwane says it was an “incredible” experience working with her. “She is very hardworking, smart and dedicated. She knows what she is getting into. There is very little I had to do other than making the world comfortable for her, and making it as real as possible. She came very well-prepared, she came to the rehearsals when we needed her. She is very secure in who she is.” Panday says perhaps it was her lack of vanity that surprised Motwane. “I am mostly a mess throughout the film. I don’t have any makeup on. And I am looking up close into the camera. Also, I knew my lines because we were shooting long scenes. The first day of the shoot itself we did 20-30 pages of the script,” she says.

JOHAR IS DELIGHTED BY the digital love coming Panday’s way, especially given the internet’s initial unfair perception. “She has always faced the camera with a certain amount of flamboyance and flair. I’m really proud of her because I’ve seen her as a child who is now blossoming into a young woman and a fantastic actor.” He says she will con­tinue to defy expectations with the role of a young Sikh lawyer in the biopic of C Sankaran Nair, who became a member of the Viceroy’s Council in 1915 with the charge of the education portfolio. As a member, he wrote two famous minutes of dissent in the ‘Dispatches on Indian Constitutional Reforms’, pointing out the various defects of British rule in India and suggesting reforms, and resigned after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

She still gets a lot of hate on social media, though, and admits that she does not deal with it well every day. “Maybe, being honest about it and showing my human side is the best way out, to not be like a robot. If I am feeling something, I need to let it out and use it in my work if I can. Also, I want to set the right example for young people out there to be confident in one’s skin,” she says.

She says she has looked up to Alia Bhatt and Kareena Kapoor Khan, not merely because of their work but also how they have conducted themselves off-screen and been unabashedly them­selves. She says she has always admired kindness and female friendships. And that is evident in her relationships. She does not feel the roles are limited any longer and there are enough well-written female parts going around. “Every time I see Janhvi or Sara doing something, I feel inspired,” she says. As for Suhana Khan (daughter of Shah Rukh and Gauri) and Shanaya Kapoor (daughter of Sanjay and Maheep), she says there is no way she can compete with them because they are like family to her. “I want them to win,” she says. “Even if I want to fight, I can’t because I believe every film is written in one’s destiny.”

Panday has recently chosen to buy her own home, a few floors up from where her parents live, where she lives with her Maltese poodle, Riot. It has given her a different perspective on life, cut out the noise, given her time to reflect. She still goes to her parents for advice but says she has a lot more agency now, where she can come to conclusions on her own.

That is Ananya Panday, just a girl, living her life in the limelight, standing there, surprising us.

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