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Deepika Padukone Personal Profile

Deepika Padukone, the daughter of the famous sportsman Prakash Padukone, is hot property in glitzworld today. Barely 19, the tall lissome beauty is already a name to reckon with in the world of modeling. Currently she is raising blood pressures with her presence in Himesh Reshammiya’s hit track Naam Hain Tera on television. Needless to say she is now being flooded with offers from the film world. She already has an attitude of a star. Reclusive and extremely selective about giving interviews, she already has a secretary to manage her affairs.

Deepika was born in Denmark but the Padukone family soon shifted their base to Bangalore and so she ended up spending most of her growing years in Bangalore, where she also first started modeling. Amongst the many commercials that she has done is the famous Liril ad for which she is acknowledged till today. “I have been doing ads since I was a kid because I was always inclined towards extra curricular activities. Whether it was dramatics, dance or sports, I did it all,”

Being the daughter of one of the best badminton players in the country had to have some brush off on the upbringing that she witnessed in her childhood and so it did. “I loved playing badminton in the few later years of my teenage life; in fact I played at the state level as well as the national but always at the back of my mind I had this urge to get into the glamour industry,” avers Deepika.

A friend whose mother was a well-known model coordinator introduced Deepika to the field of showbiz. “My friend’s mother suggested that I should get a portfolio clicked and I did so and later I got a few ad campaigns which slowly led to taking up a full time career in modeling,” states Deepika.

Models emerging as actors in Bollywood is an age-old trend in India. Whether it s a Zeenat Aman in the seventies or a Bipasha Basu now, but Deepika is quick to tell you that she hasn’t used modeling as a stepping one. Instead she discovered that she had an acting bug even as she was well into modeling. “I never had any dreams to enter Bollywood. My first love has always been modeling and it will remain so. But when I was acting in advertisements I realized that I had an acting bug in me and I didn’t want it to go waste so I decided to take a plunge and enter Bollywood. So it would not be right to say that I used modeling as a stepping-stone. I never had any intentions of doing so.”

Deepika will be making her debut on screen with a Kannada film, Aishwarya. But why not a Hindi film especially since there have been so many offers “I don’t see any harm in that. I think I have always had a soft corner for down south as I was born and brought up in Bangalore. I am very comfortable with their language. And besides I think they make films, which are very meaningful and are great to watch. From the beginning I have been very selective about my work and although I was getting a lot of offers from many directors from Bollywood I was not getting what I was really looking for. While in the interim I got a sensible character in a Kannada film so I decided to take it up. Also my co star in the film Mr.Upendra is a superstar down south what better could I have asked for.”

With her dad as a national level sportsman, wasn’t she coaxed into joining sports? “No not at all, my parents have been very understanding all throughout; I was always allowed to take my own decisions. Not just me but even my father had moved away from the general agenda of a career that people considered during his time and took up badminton as a career, which was not well recognized back then and he was successful in the decision he took, so probably that was the reason he always gave me and my sister a free hand.”

Well, it’s the ‘free hand’ that seems to be working for Deepika Padukone.