Palomi Ghosh is a very greedy woman. Those are her own words. She’s left behind a career in the sciences, become an actor and singer, and now she’s set her sights on dancing before pursuing other desires. “Why can’t she be everything?” demands Ghosh before breaking into childish glee. “She IS everything!” The actor-singer and hopefully future dancer is chatting with me during an unforgiving and blistering hot October afternoon. Dressed in a blue summer dress, Ghosh is exuberant, talking about how she came to be Kajol’s voice in Helicopter Eela and her projects before that.
As luck would have it
Ghosh, who was born and raised in Gujarat — “I can read and write in Gujarati, I love my dal dhokli and I can sing garba songs!” — found meteoric success with in an unassuming source. She starred in the low-budget Konkani Nachom-ia Kumpasar (2015) based on the life of Goan grande dame Lorna Cordeiro. “It was bizarre. My life is all about happenstance,” says the actor who returned to India a few years ago on a six-month sabbatical. She hasn’t left yet.
Ghosh wouldn’t have starred in Nachom-ia Kumpasar if producer Radheyshyam Pipalwa [RS] wasn’t clearning out unwanted files on his computer. “R.S. was dragging [my photos] to the trash bin. Instead he opened them,” she giggles. The actor was then called in to audition for the role of Lorna. “How I got Mukti Bhavan is also somewhat like that.” The actor-singer was at the International Film Festival of India for the screening of Nachom-ia Kumpasar when a Q&A session with A.R Rahman at Film Bazaar had Ghosh belting out a Konkani song on a whim. “[Afterwards, the director Shubhashaish Bhutiani] comes up to me and says, ‘You have balls of steel. Will you do my film?’,” recalls Ghosh. “I’m the only actor [from Mukti Bhavan] that didn’t get tested.”
Filmmaker Mira Nair, saw Ghosh as Lorna at a London screening later approaching her at a gala dinner in New York. “She said you have to work in this musical with me and I was sitting with Mira Nair just chilling. It [was] absolutely magical,” she says talking about her part in the stage musical adapted from the film, Monsoon Wedding. Then fate intervened with Helicopter Eela. Director Pradeep Sarkar who’s known to do audio boards before a film, got Ghosh to voice protagonist Kajol’s parts. “There was a scratch song which I had done and when Kajol heard [me], she said you sound just like me,” says the actor-singer who eventually sang three songs for the film.
Best laid-back plans
While her upcoming Kadak is in limbo because of sexual harassment charges against director Rajat Kapoor, Ghosh has other projects lined up. There’s Satellite Shankar with Sooraj Pancholi, directed by Irfan Kamal. She’s also part of Prashant Nair’s next untitled project. “It’s an anthology of four stories that Prashant has written himself and it’s a mix of different genres,” she says. “It’s unlike I’ve done before.”
Admittedly, Ghosh has been incredibly lucky with opportunities falling in her lap, but she’s also discerning about choosing projects. “It’s a two-way street,” she smiles. With a career that began in commercials, Ghosh has an eclectic mix in her professional kitty. As a six-year-old, she’d entertain her mother in the kitchen singing old Hindi songs. Today’s she a playback singer and has starred in one theatrical production and a film. She pursued mathematics and science in school, but a theatre elective led her to Bollywood. “Singing was never meant to be a career choice and neither was acting,” she says. “I’ve gotten a lot of flak for [not having a plan],” she guffaws. “You make all these plans but things just happen when they happen.”