logo
I long for meaningful roles: Mandira Bedi

I long for meaningful roles: Mandira Bedi

Time of India3 days ago
Mandira Bedi recounts her cricket hosting days and how she is looking for more interesting roles
Mandira Bedi
, who broke ground as one of the first women to host cricket on Indian television, admits she still feels a sense of nostalgia when she reminisces about those days, but she has made peace with the shift in her career.
'When the telecast rights moved to another channel, I was not associated with it. I felt sad but then had to move on. Honestly, I believe that everything happens for a reason and then your path shifts to another space. Being 31 years in the business, I've done so many different things throughout my career. I look at the variability of it all and I'm nothing but grateful.'
When asked if she would like to return to hosting cricket, she says, 'If it means keeping me away from my kids for 15–20 days at a stretch, then I can't do that.
I would have to get my mom to fly down to Mumbai. I would have to make major adjustments. Right now, work is making me travel for a few days here and there. I work 12–14 days a month, and that keeps me in a good place because I'm a very hands-on mom.'
Mandira who was last seen in the web show, The Railway Men (2023), says that acting is something that she is still passionate about. 'What I do miss is acting, it is still close to my heart,' she says, adding, 'Working on The Railway Men reminded me of how alive I feel in front of the camera. In recent times, I got offers to play a cricket presenter or news anchor, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm an actor at heart, and I long for meaningful roles.
'
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

The Theatre of Ratan Thiyam: Profound Beauty on the Modern Stage
The Theatre of Ratan Thiyam: Profound Beauty on the Modern Stage

The Wire

time5 minutes ago

  • The Wire

The Theatre of Ratan Thiyam: Profound Beauty on the Modern Stage

I remember Ratan Thiyam, almost always dressed in black, performing an elaborate curtain call along with his actors at the end of his show. Together they would all go down on their knees and touch their foreheads to the stageboards so as to thank the audience for coming to the performance. The grace of this gesture in some sense encoded the essence of Ratan's theatre work – its formal rigour and its elegance as it walked the fine line between performance and secular ritual for, and of, the modern stage. One the most celebrated theatre makers of India, Ratan Thiyam, who passed on July 23, 2025, in Imphal at the age of 77, was in command of many roles at one and the same time throughout his life. He was a theatre director of brilliance, but was also a writer and a poet, a theatre teacher, a guru, a distinguished organiser and a leader – heading institutions like the National School of Drama as its Director (1987–88) and as its Chairperson (2013–17), while creatively shaping the artistic style of the renowned Chorus Repertory Company that has performed across India and the world to great acclaim for more than four decades. However, let me begin this tribute to Ratan by taking a step sideways. It is said that there is a philosophical connection between landscape artists, horticulturalists and theatre makers. All of them understand the effects of a slant of light, the depth of shadow, grades of colour, chiaroscuro, and the inter-relationships, by placement, between nature, humans and objects. I had the occasion several years ago to visit the Chorus Repertory Company, located at the edges of Imphal city, and I vividly remember the nearly three-acre site: the neatly trimmed hedges, the small pond, the clusters of trees with blossoming vines wrapped around their trunks, the flower beds, the vegetable patch, and the gravelly pathways connecting one part to another. The vegetables harvested from the fields fed everyone who lived on site including Ratan. He lovingly introduced the garden, the water body and the plants, many of which he had planted himself. Also read: Ratan Thiyam, the Risks He Took and the Future of Indian Theatre Working the land was a part of the daily routine set up several decades before the connections between agricultural activity and theatre practice had come into focus, as they have done now. Apart from this there was, and still is, another routine in place – of practising movement, breath, vocalisation, song and music derived from the vocabularies of Manipuri dance traditions, martial arts and ritual practices. This training happened in a cluster of buildings set amidst the landscape, that included an exhibition space, a rehearsal space, and a blackbox theatre equipped with light and sound systems. Away from the noise of the city, the Chorus Repertory as imagined by Ratan functions as a sort of ashram, where skill is transferred to the shishya – student – on a daily and continual basis, a mode of transmission different from the segmented time-tables of 'modern' theatre training institutes. But back to the theatre maker and the horticulturalist, and their understanding of atmosphere – which is objective and subjective, material and non-material, at the same time; something that you can breathe in and recognise it to be joy or peace or melancholy for instance, but not know what it is that you have drawn into your lungs. Ratan's use of light and shadow in theatre is unparalleled. He was able to create degrees of darkness on the stage – experienced as sometimes dense and sometimes diffuse with a precision that requires an exact understanding of the properties of lighting apparatus. At one moment the lights dimmed so low that you might see nothing but the glint of sequins on the potloi (the structured skirt worn by Manipuri dancers) as a group of performers glide across the stage; at another moment you might see a slash of light illuminate fingers wrists and upper arms flickering against the cyclorama – leaves, insects or distress signals from a drowning chorus? From the dark upstage you might see a tall, white fabric umbrella, held firmly by an actor, float downstage, to form a halo ─ marking a passage to the heavens? The tumultuous clang and flash of hand-held gongs deafen and blind the spectators as the chakravyuh gains the velocity of a tornado in a circle of red beams. And who can forget the often-cited image of an elephant materialising on stage as if in a dream, in his memorable production of Agyeya's Uttarapriyadarshi! These are stage effects that cause the heart to pound. Almost nobody understood the magic of the image in theatre better than Ratan Thiyam. And almost nobody used the proscenium arch theatre, also known as the picture-frame stage, better than him. The picture-frame stage, brought to India by the British to house their theatricals, has given rise to much debate. The proscenium, as we know, is the architectural frame that edges the opening of the stage. The major experiential convention it produces is a play of dark and light; the stage being illumined while the audience is in darkness is as much an emotional experience as it is material. What effect does such architectural framing have on traditional forms and their grammars? How does it change our viewing habits and our expectations? Ratan Thiyam's work, performed primarily in the proscenium, disturbs assumptions and generates a contradiction. Even when he remodelled traditional grammars, and reshaped gestures drawn from Manipuri martial arts and dance forms so as to align them with the enclosing edges of the frame, Ratan produced performances that have often been understood as, or even become synonymous with, Indian theatre. A description that we must inflect, gloss and interrogate by keeping his remodelling, his refashioning of form stance and music in mind. Ratan Thiyam's luminous stage work exceeds description; what stays in our memory is his love for the craft of theatre, and the beauty it can produce. It reminds us that meaning-making in theatre is not by word alone but by all the elements that make up the performance – from minutiae such as glinting sequins and flying tassels on costume, to the voluminosity of shadowed tableaus and grand battles choreographed to thunderous percussion that judder the very foundations of the auditorium. Our homage to Ratan Thiyam: the person who ignited the spell of material fiction that is theatre; the one whose aesthetic and pedagogical imagination enhanced the discourse of modern Indian theatre.

Tomorrowland 2025: Indian content creator Ankush Bahuguna's traditional outfit goes viral, netizens react
Tomorrowland 2025: Indian content creator Ankush Bahuguna's traditional outfit goes viral, netizens react

First Post

time19 minutes ago

  • First Post

Tomorrowland 2025: Indian content creator Ankush Bahuguna's traditional outfit goes viral, netizens react

The creator captioned the post- '@tomorrowland is a whole new world out there! Can't wait for Day 2 & 3(if I still have feet by then.' read more Indian content creator Ankush Bahuguna's traditional outfit from Tomorrowland 2025 festival has gone viral and netizens cannot stop reacting as he effortlessly donned a lungi. The creator captioned the post- '@tomorrowland is a whole new world out there! Can't wait for Day 2 & 3(if I still have feet by then 🤣) STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD . Wearing @_huemn Red bracelet @nappadori Neck piece @ . #tomorrowland #ootd #tomorrowland.' Here are some reactions that dropped in: South indians will be so happy seeing you flaunting lungi❤️🙌❤️ Kudos to Promoting LOONGI internationally✅! Tomorrowland wasn't ready for this! 😀 Ankushhhhh tum Lungi pehnke Tomorrowland chale gaye???? Ahhhh!!!! You are living a dream bro…. Love it 🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻 as usual, ATE THIS UP!!!!! ALWAYS THE BEST FITS AND MAKEUP LOOKS IN THE GAME! On the digital scam that happened 'It was good to know I wasn't the only one who wasn't aware of this(digital arrest). There were many others who didn't know about this scam, too. I'm glad I could save some people from falling for it. More than the money aspect of it, such online scams mentally shake you.' He credited the 'lovely' people around him for consoling and helping him get out of it. Ankush's loved ones told him, 'Don't beat yourself over it. It wasn't your fault.'

Bend It Like Beckham 2 coming soon. Filmmaker Gurinder Chadha hints at something new
Bend It Like Beckham 2 coming soon. Filmmaker Gurinder Chadha hints at something new

India Today

time20 minutes ago

  • India Today

Bend It Like Beckham 2 coming soon. Filmmaker Gurinder Chadha hints at something new

Indian-origin filmmaker Gurinder Chadha has officially confirmed that a sequel to her iconic 2002 film 'Bend It Like Beckham' is in development. Chadha shared her excitement about returning to the beloved story that broke new ground in sports cinema and to Deadline, the filmmaker said, 'I'm excited to revisit the original characters and revive the enduring story and build on the legacy we helped to create for the women's game."advertisementThe original film starred Parminder Nagra as Jess, a British Indian teenager passionate about football, and Keira Knightley as her supportive friend. Despite her love for the game, Jess faces resistance from her traditional immigrant parents, a conflict that resonated deeply with audiences around the world. Chadha hopes to bring back the original cast for the sequel. When asked if they're aware of the project, she said, 'They obviously want to see a script before they commit...I'm pretty certain that everyone's going to want to come back. Everything hinges on the script and if the original cast likes it.'She also emphasised that the sequel will give meaningful space to returning characters. 'I am working really hard to make sure every character I bring back has a decent arc and scenes,' she in 2002, 'Bend It Like Beckham' became a much-loved film for its simple yet powerful story. It showed the struggles of identity, gender roles, and how South Asians are seen in Western countries. With actors like Anupam Kher and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in key roles, the film connected with audiences of all ages, especially inspiring many young women to follow their dreams in sports.- Ends

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store