| Parineeti Chopra | |
|---|---|
 Chopra at the 13th IIFA Awards voting ceremony, 2012 |
|
| Born | 12 May 1988 Ambala, Haryana, India |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 2011–present |
| Height | 1.72 m (5 ft 7 1⁄2 in) |
| Relatives | Priyanka Chopra (Cousin) |
Contents
- 1 Biography
- 2 Awards and nominations
- 3 Filmography
- 4 References
- 5 External links
1988–2010: Early life
Chopra was born into a Punjabi family in Ambala, Haryana.[7][8] Her father, Pawan Chopra is a business man and supplier of the Indian Army,[9] her mother is Reena Chopra, she has two brothers,[10] and actress Priyanka Chopra is her cousin.[5] Chopra did her schooling at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, in the Ambala Cantonment. According to herself, she was a topper in school.[11]
2011–present: Debut and breakthrough
In 2011, director Maneesh Sharma, who worked under Yash Raj Films and had met and interacted with Chopra, wanted her to play a role in his second project Ladies VS Ricky Bahl and asked her to do a "dummy audition for fun".[16] Chopra remarked that she was "fooling around with a camera" and performed some of the dialogues of Geet from the film Jab We
Once Upon a Time in Radioland: A Kind of Ruritanian Romance
The
other day, at my favorite bookstore here in Aberystwyth, I was caught
in the eye by what struck me as a highly unusual cover for a 1938
edition of Anthony Hope’s fanciful pageturner The Prisoner of Zenda.
Mind you, I’m not likely to turns those pages any time soon. I’m not
one for Graustarkian excursions. That I found the old chestnut so
arresting is due to the way in which it was sold anew to an audience of
Britons to whom such a mode of escape from the crisis-ridden everyday
must have been sufficiently attractive already. This was the 92nd
impression of Zenda; and, with Europe at the brink of war, Ruritania
must have sounded to those who prefer to face the future with their head
in the hourglass contents of yesteryear like a travel deal too hard to
resist.
Now, the publishers, Arrowsmith, weren’t taking any chances.
Judging by the cover telling as much, they were looking for novel ways
of repackaging a familiar volume that few British public and private libraries
could have been wanting at the time.
 |
| Cinegram No. 4, from my collection |
British moviegoers had just seen Ruritania appear before
their very eyes in the 1937 screen version of the romance, which make dashing
Ronald Colman an obvious salesperson and accounts for his presence on the dust
jacket. It is the line underneath,
though, that made me look: “The Book of the Radio Broadcast,” the advertising
slogan reads. Desperate, anachronistic,
and now altogether unthinkable, these words reminded me just how far removed we
are from those olden days when radio ruled the waves.
“The Prisoner of Zenda
was recently the subject of a highly successful film,” the copy on the inside
states somewhat pointlessly in the face of the faces on the cover. What’s more, it continues, a “further mark of
its popularity” was the story’s “selection by the BBC as a radio serial
broadcast on the National Programme.” To this day, the BBC produces and airs a great number of serial
adaptations of classic, popular or just plain old literature; but, however
reassuring this continuation of a once prominent storytelling tradition may be,
a reminder of the fact that books are still turned into sound-only dramas would
hardly sell copies these days. Radio still sells merchandise—but a line
along the lines of “as heard on radio” is pretty much unheard of in advertising
these days.
“This book is the original story on which the broadcast was
based,” the dust jacket blurb concludes.
I, for one, would have been more thrilled to get my hands or ears on the adaptation,
considering that all we have left of much of the BBC’s output of aural drama is
such ocular proof of radio’s diminished status and pop-cultural clout.
Perhaps, my enthusiasm at this find was too much tempered with the
frustration and regret such a nostalgic tease provokes. At any rate, I
very nearly left Ystwyth Books
without the volume in my hands. That I walked off with it after all is
owing
to our friend, novelist Lynda Waterhouse, who saw me giving it the eye
and made
me a handsome present of it. And there
it sits now on my bookshelf, a tattered metaphor of my existence: I am
stuck in
a past that was never mine to outlive, grasping at second-hand-me-downs
and gasping
for recycled air . . . a prisoner of a Zenda of my own unmaking.
Posted 13 hours ago by Harry Heuser
