A fun-filled encounter

IT COULDN'T have been scripted any better. What is meant is that it was one boy-meet-girl story that couldn't have been scripted at all.

It was that down-to-earth, a real yet fun-filled encounter all the way, when Sify.com got the winner of its ``Dine with the Star'' contest to have lunch with Prashanth at Peshawri, Chola Sheraton last week.

Archana (a 12th standard student of P.S. Senior Secondary School) `bunked' school to meet the star. Incidentally, she had an exam coming up a few hours after lunch. Prashanth landed up almost on time, shook hands with the winner and took the seat right beside her for the next two hours.

Her favourite heroes were Madhavan, Ajit, Vikram, Abbas and finally Prashanth (in that order). But the lunch seemed to have changed all those equations. It propelled Prashanth straight to the top of that list. Such was his wit and sense of humour.

Prashanth ordered for Rumali Rotis, Raan (lamb curry) along with Murg Malai Kabab, Bharwan Shimla Mirch, Kali Daal, Paneer and Pulav. Just a while before that when the waiter placed the menu printed on varnished wood, Prashanth was quick to quip: ``Food ketta wood kudukkuranga'' (Ask for food but we get wood).

No, seriously, that was just the beginning. The lines only got better with time. When asked about the movies she had recently seen of Prashanth's, Archana's reply: ``Thiruda Thiruda''. She had seen it on TV recently.

If you thought that the fact that the girl hadn't seen any of his recent movies would have put off the Prashanth, you got it wrong.

Prashanth, in fact, started narrating anecdotes (some really interesting ones) from the making of ``Thiruda Thiruda''.

Soon, Archana asked him about the heroines including Aishwarya Rai, Isha Koppikar, Amisha Patel, Rinke Khanna, Riya Sen, Simran and now Jyotika.

And he laughed. ``Lucky me,'' he says, with his tongue still in- cheek. ``I am very lucky to have worked with such beautiful people, but it's not that I get my directors or producers to cast them opposite to me.''

When Archana started playing the build-a-script game, she said she wanted Prashanth to play a bad guy, but not a bad guy for the whole movie.

In the next 45 minutes, the story assumed hilarious proportions - the fictitious movie on the cards, `Thungum Thangam Pongum Singam' starred Prashanth with Kareena Kapoor (as the girl who loves him), Sushmita Sen (as an extra), Arvind Swamy (as the surprise villain of the murder mystery), Vijayakanth and Prakash Raj (as cops in guest roles) and surprise, surprise Alphonsa (as the girl Prashanth loves, she plays Arvind Swamy's wife who gets killed mysteriously in the course of the movie) and one more surprise - a horse which Prashanth falls in love with.

It was a laugh riot all the way when Prashanth being quite a sport, took digs at himself, his sometimes atrocious costumes, his roles, industry conventions and whatever punch-line that came his way, sparing none in the table.

Soon, it was time to leave, when Prashanth volunteered to sign Archana's leave-letter and also gave her tips on how to go about her exams.

``He's certainly better than what he comes across in the movies,'' was what Archana had to say, at the end of the lunch which she would cherish for a long time to come.

By Sudhish Kamath

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