New Delhi, May 27 (Daily Bhaskar) : Eminent Actor-turned-politician Smriti Irani has been named the Human Resource Development Minister (HRD). She challenged the Gandhi scion, Rahul Gandhi in the 2014 general elections and lost. However, she managed to scare the Gandhi scion by reducing his victory margin to just over one lakh votes.
What people may not know is the humble roots of Smriti Irani. When Smriti Irani, was still a schoolgirl in Delhi, her parents invited an astrologer to predict their three daughters’ futures. He declared that while her two younger sisters would do all right, but the eldest daughter’s future is bleak. Her parents — her half-Punjabi half-Maharashtrian father and Bengali-Assamese mother — had no big dreams for her either.
But Irani had other ideas. Growing up in Delhi, the self-confessed quiet bookworm wanted to become a civil servant or a journalist. Her father thought that neither profession would suit her. So she did the next best thing she could think of. She packed her bags and left for Mumbai, the city of possibilities. And it certainly did seem like that. Irani decided to enter the Miss India but she failed to win there.
Back then, nothing seemed to go right for her. She would turn up for TV auditions and keep getting rejected. Meanwhile, she had a loan — she had borrowed money from her father — to pay off.
She took the first job she could find — clearing tables and cleaning the floor at a new McDonald’s in Bandra. Her first TV break came when she got a call from the producer of a show called Bakeman’s Ooh La La. That’s where TV producer Shobha Kapoor spotted her.
One thing led to another and Smriti was signed on to play the lead role of Tulsi in the Hindi serial, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. Kyunki… ran for eight years and Irani became India’s most famous television actress even as her character, Tulsi, became India’s most loved daughter-in-law. Tulsi was a role tailormade made for an aspiring woman politician’s fast-track entry into politics.