You can’t please everyone: Mandira Bedi 
The numbers of my name are the same as those of certain celebrities who are in trouble. They add up to signify victim.’ And hey, I am convinced,” says Mandira Bedi. Maybe some of the names of our cricket team members also added to the same number!
Mandira’s million-dollar smile lights up the surroundings. “Seriously it appears that the last World Cup (the latest one being the Twenty20 world cup), is memorable for all the wrong reasons and the team was not even a part of the entire hullabaloo…I
was at the eye of the storm.” First came her comment on the Bangladesh team’s win over India, she called them “lucky,” then came the tattoo and the tricolour on the wrong end of her sari. Tell her that’s how she got to do her bit for the Indian team and she looks heavenwards, “Yeah! Right.”
Mandira Bedi was on board ‘Extraa Innings’ with SETMax from 2003. That a woman could talk about cricket has found some acceptance but the jury is still out on that one. “I joined the panel as a representative of the common man. I am not there to pretend to be a Harsha Bhogle or a Charu Sharma. I was roped in to bring in a certain amount of energy to the show, which I believe I have. People were angry but four years down the line I have earned acceptance. You can’t please all the people all the time.” She admits she has learnt with experience. Cricket, although it dominates her job profile, is just an aspect of her career, “people seem to have forgotten that I started out as an actor, with “Shanti”.”
She is an actor - television and film, anchor, model and still looking to expand her repertoire. “I have this ‘to-do’ list, where I have crossed cricket commentary, playing a negative character, doing an item number, posing for a men’s magazine…ahem!” she says.
And that’s not just it, she has even acted in a Balaji production and in nothing less than “Kyun ki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi”. “Oh! That is again from ‘the list’. I wanted to do a negative role. But then after a while I realised I wasn’t convinced, I can’t do something if I am not convinced,” she says.
She is also part of a new show on ESPN “Dream Job”, which is a talent hunt for a sports anchor, “what better person other than me. I can totally relate to what is going on in the participant’s head. So, I am the ‘good cop’.”
Mandira’s great love is theatre. “Theatre is the great love of my life. I have done a couple of plays by Rael Padamsee. It is great, the feeling of interacting with a live audience is such a high.”
A trip to the new Seven Wonders of the World and the release of her film ‘Meerabai Not Out’ are the two things that she is looking forward to.
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