5th Book of 2021
Well, everyone who knows me are aware of my craziness for Priyanka Chopra. This started right from when I saw her in her first small appearance in the movie “The Hero” and later when the promos of her Bollywood movies started back to back, I just kept falling in love with her. And this stayed till 4 years back after which she moved out of India and left Bollywood as if it didn’t matter to her. When I learnt that she is releasing a book on her life, I got very excited and purchased one for myself and completed reading it within 4 days itself.
To start with, I had lots of expectation with Priyanka Chopra’s book named “Unfinished” but unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything motivating enough to move me out of my current mindset. Yes, there are few quotes here and there which are effective but the way her life story has been written without a proper flow makes it hard to understand what’s exactly happening and with a new occurrence in her life, what kind of transformation she really goes through and how challenging it is for her to cope up with it. Most of the times, she ends up discussing and introducing her family members or Nick Jonas’.
Most of the people who know Priyanka Chopra know through her Bollywood career and let me tell you, the way she has completely ignored her journey with Hindi film industry speaks a lot about a person’s attitude towards being gratitude for the platform which gave the utmost recognition and success. She looks completely in awe of whatever is happening with her in USA and has no inclination or nostalgia attached with her own country anymore. This feeling can be experienced as a reader in every page that you’ll read and it becomes irritating after a point of time. At times, you will even feel as if the book is written only for her new American friends who don’t know about her as she ends up describing Indian culture most of the times in the book.
The book starts with her childhood and school days where she tells how she had to live away from her parents with her relatives and then how she migrated out of India for a long time (even then) from where she learnt many things on how to handle herself against bullies, discrimination and competition. Later, she talks descriptively about various challenges she and her mother faced when they entered Miss India and Miss World competition in her late teens. Reading the final part of that story does give some inspiration for sure but nothing which will wake you up from your dull life.
Then she tells on how she prepared for her acting career and the challenges faced there as she got rejected from movies and replaced by other actresses who had better connections with the respective actors of the movie. But again, as I said above, there are many stories about Priyanka Chopra that we have heard from media – some of them must be true as well as false on which she could have shed some light and helped us know her perspective but what she has done is – spoken only about those factors which are already available in the public forum or where she has already given some lights before. This was very disappointing as we don’t get to know any more about her personality than what we are already aware of. I was also looking for certain instances as to what would be her 1st reaction when she would be meeting Bollywood legends like Amitabh Bachchan or Shahrukh Khan etc. but alas, there is no mention of all these at all.
Overall, this is quite a disappointment considering that you don’t learn anything from this autobiography which is generally an intention of a reader when he/she picks up a book from such genre of such a personality. How she maintains her hard schedule, her workout style, her view on yoga and meditation, her opinion about being workaholic, multi-tasking, Me-too campaign, nepotism in Bollywood, fight against depression etc. is not discussed at all. I believe all of this is her USP and it could have been a magical book if she focused more on what kind of efforts one has to invest to reach from being a normal girl to an International artist than talking in depth about her marriage ceremonies, Miss India/World competitions, UNICEF campaign in details etc. At some places, she is telling us things about how it happens in India – well, why do you need to focus on that? The focus should have been on her attitude towards things, people, work etc. Also, the book sometimes looks as if a newcomer is trying to grab attention even when Priyanka Chopra is now world-known.
I seriously couldn’t understand why this memoir has been written at all when it didn’t have any good self-help or opening-oneself-to-all agenda. I give this book just 2.75 stars out of 5. And yes, in the kind of pricing this is being made available to the readers, don’t think twice in ignoring this book while surfing on Internet or browsing at a bookshop. A very anticipated book has been written in a very careless form – at times in a language and vocabulary sounding like a teenager.
Well, that’s all.
Thanks.
WRITING BUDDHA
No comments:
Post a Comment