Actor Priyanka Chopra was not the obvious choice for the Miss India title 18 years ago as one of the jury members felt her complexion was “too dark”, says a new book on the star who turned 36 today.<\/p>\n
Then 17, Priyanka took part in the beauty contest from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh and emerged as the runner-up — Femina Miss India World 2000.<\/p>\n
Lara Dutta was crowned Femina Miss India Universe, while the second runner-up Dia Mirza won the Femina Miss India Asia Pacific title. All three women went on to clinch the title in their respective categories — Miss Universe, Miss World and Miss Asia Pacific.<\/p>\n
In “Priyanka Chopra: The Incredible Story of a Global Bollywood Star”, Pradeep Guha, one of the mentors of the contestants for that year’s contest, remembers how one of the jury members was uncertain about Priyanka.<\/p>\n
“Not everybody in the jury was initially in favour of her. One person mentioned she’s too dark,” he recalls, without naming the jury member.<\/p>\n
“I said, ‘Yaar come on — look at South American girls. They keep winning and some of them are pretty dark as are all the girls from Africa. So I said what are you talking about? ‘I was always very certain about her and as I said this woman never made a mistake twice,” Guha is quoted in the biography by Aseem Chhabra.<\/p>\n
The contestants faced a range of celebrity judges – actors Shah Rukh Khan, Juhi Chawla and Waheeda Rehman, cricketer Mohammed Azharuddin, media mogul and film producer Pritish Nandy, painter Anjolie Ela Menon, the then founder-chairman of Zee Media (and now Rajya Sabha MP) Subhash Chandra, fashion designer and perfume queen Carolina Herrera, and Marcus Swarovski, the great-great-grand nephew of the founder of the Austrian crystal company.<\/p>\n
“She kind of always improved on herself day on day, day on day. I knew that she would give in 200 per cent if she gets in,” Guha says in the Rupa Publications’ book.<\/p>\n
He says he was impressed with Priyanka from the beginning but for some reason she did not come up as the “obvious choice” although she grew through the contest.<\/p>\n
“I think she needed a little more confidence. I think she wasn’t quite sure initially whether this was the thing she wanted to do. She came in a bit tentatively. By the time the contest started she seemed a lot more collected and definitely more confident of herself.”<\/p>\n
Part of the reason Priyanka felt unsure was because she was an outsider, as compared to some of the other contestants, including Lara who was already a professional model, Guha says.<\/p>\n
Another mentor, Sathya Saran, says she remembers Priyanka because they did not notice her in the beginning.<\/p>\n
“I noticed her at the talent contest, because she sang beautifully. I told Pradeep she is going to win something,” Saran says.<\/p>\n
When the results were announced, there was a tie between the top contestants Priyanka and Lara. Guha and Saran had experienced a similar situation with Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai in 1994.<\/p>\n
“This time, they were better prepared and additional questions were posed to both Priyanka and Lara. The final results were no surprise to anyone. The suave, elegant well-spoken Lara Dutta won the Miss India title,” the book says.<\/p>\n
Both Lara and Priyanka worked together in one of their initial films “Andaz” alongside Akshay Kumar in 2003.<\/p>\n
Priyanka has managed to carve an international career and is now one of the most recognisable Indian faces working in Hollywood.<\/p>\n
The actor, in past interviews, has spoken about facing issues due to her complexion even within her “Punjabi family”.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Actor Priyanka Chopra was not the obvious choice for the Miss India title 18 years ago as one of the jury members felt her complexion was “too dark”, says a new book on the star who turned 36 today. Then 17, Priyanka took part in the beauty contest from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh and emerged as the runner-up — Femina Miss India World 2000. Lara Dutta was crowned Femina Miss India Universe, while the second runner-up Dia Mirza won the Femina Miss India Asia Pacific title. All three women went on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15472"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15474,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15472\/revisions\/15474"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}