newsletter issue 345

A decade ago, Mona Singh almost quit TV. Now she’s everywhere. This year, the actor has had nearly as many releases as months—her sixth, Raju Hirani’s cyber-crime dramedy ‘Pritam and Pedro’, dropped in July. And there are at least eight upcoming projects listed on her IMDb page. “I am so happy,” Singh beams. “It’s not the quantity that I’m celebrating. It’s the spectrum. There’s six different women on screen.”

These include a Goan granny-core gangster in Vir Das’s ‘Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos’; a fauji wife in ‘Border 2’; a cold-blooded mafioso in ‘Subedaar’; and a pressured sub-inspector in Sudip Sharma’s ‘Kohrra 2’. It’s as if the much-discussed creative drought ravaging the Hindi entertainment industry has skipped her altogether. She chuckles, “It’s not been a sudden burst for me. This has been the harvest of years of patience.”

Singh entered the TV industry at 22, the star of primetime hit ‘Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin’. By 24, she was riding the country’s first reality TV boom, hosting and competing in a clutch of popular shows. She quiet-quit television by 2014 and began to navigate a slow transition to the internet. But what she’d been waiting for was a deeper creative satisfaction that went beyond TV’s “binary track of good girl or villain”. Read her story on The Nod.