What's her secret?

She didn't know a word of Hindi. She's not the critics' favourite. She doesn't come from a film family. And yet, she's at the top. How did Katrina Kaif pull that off? Sunday MiD DAY gets answers

Going back to when she was a model is all a bit hazy for Katrina Kaif, but this memory is still raw. She was 19; just out of the cobwebs of her disastrous debut Boom and acting in Telugu film Allari Pidugu with N T Rama Rao's son Balakrishna, a sweet 45-year-old co-star "who got on better with my mother" because Katrina and he were in different age brackets.

"It was an unbelievably low time. I didn't sleep for six days straight because I was so unhappy, I didn't want to wake up to my life. Allari Pidugu's director Jayant (Paranjee) and his wife never asked me what was up, but they gave me support. To cheer me up, Jayant included a line in one song, 'You're like the sunshine'," Katrina says, her eyes crinkling up in a smile, still touched by the little act of kindness. It was a line in English, a familiar language for a 19-year-old struggling in an alien tongue.

'YOUNG, BUBBLY AND VERY LUCKY'
Katrina claims that that girl and she are two different people today. That's easy to digest. Last totaled, Katrina has had seven hits since 2007 and one flop in Yuvvraaj. This, without doing a film with Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan or Hrithik Roshan, unlike other top heroines Kareena Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra and Aishwarya Rai.

"She's young, bubbly and very lucky. That's a deadly combination," points out trade analyst Amod Mehra, "The Hindi film industry is a superstitious one so the buzz is that Blue took such a huge opening because of her five-minute role in it. Katrina shares Kareena's place for the top slot today." Says the owner of the Bandra multiplex Gaiety-Galaxy, Manoj Desai, "The masses love to see her with Akshay Kumar. They don't care about her Hindi; after all, people accept Sonia Gandhi speaking in Hindi. She looks innocent to them, even when she's holding up money and saying, 'Paisa, paisa, paisa' in that De Dhana Dhan song."

Ironically, most film critics believe that Katrina struggles to emote. "I don't like what your reviews say about me," she says casually at the opening of this interview, "but I don't take reviews personally. It's part of the game."

'WHEN I WAS LOST, SALMAN WAS THERE'
We're at Katrina's home in Bandra, furnished in wood and warm colours. Wearing jeans, a tee and a light baggy sweater, she stretches out full-length on a couch and relaxes with a pot of green tea and an egg white omelette. It's 8 pm, a long day after five hours of nonstop promoting Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani (releasing November 6) and tomorrow she heads for Delhi, then Jaipur.

She rolls her eyes and says she must start packing soon, showing us the heap of clothes on her bed. Regular 24-year-old. But one who has been dating superstar Salman Khan for the last five years.

Since Katrina prefers keeping her personal life private, Salman's name crops up, but is handled judiciously. Seen as an actress who was mentored by the superstar, Katrina carefully answers the question of what her career would have been like if she hadn't met Salman.

"It's my destiny. I don't know what it would have been like if Salman wasn't my friend," she says, seriously, "Everyone knows I don't like discussing the details of our relationship because it's a never-ending process, like eating Pringle chips. I'm too sensitive and emotional to go into those zones. But I can say if there's anyone I respect in my universe after my mother, it's Salman. At first, I felt fear going on set. When I was lost, Salman was there to guide me."

'THERE IS NO MYSTERY'
The media deduces that there's so much mystery over who Katrina is because of her relationship with Salman.

The actress though says that's because she didn't come from a film family and rarely divulged details on her own. In fact, rumour went that she was Pakistani.

"It's ridiculous. Why wouldn't I want to admit that then? I'm half Indian. My mother is British, my father Kashmiri. He split up with the mother early on and since we're six girls, we're defensive about random comments. My mother has been doing charitable work for 28 years and runs a charity in Madurai. I don't want my life thrown in her face all the time. There is no mystery, but I understand that people think, 'hello, who're you?'" she says.u00a0u00a0u00a0

The accent comes from a childhood spent fragmented all over the world Hong Kong, Japan, France, Hawaii and London. Katrina says she describes her growing years as frugal, where she traded tasks with sisters so she could collect her favourite marbles. Strangely, she studied civil engineering. "I had grand dreams of graduating in petro-chemical engineering, but my teachers told me, 'You have no aptitude for this. You would have failed all your exams had we not given you the answers and we gave you those because they were hardly any students here. We don't see you making it as an engineer!"'u00a0

QUEUE KI...
So at age 17, Katrina started modeling in London, where she met Kaizad Gustad and was offered Boom. When Boom sank, she spent one year taking Hindi tuitions, learning kathak (from the same master as Lara Dutta and Priyanka Chopra) and modeling.

Katrina describes those days, meeting fashion magazine editors and photographers and dropping off pictures. "I used to take taxis to Famous Studio, stand with 300 other models for an audition, hold up my name on a board and pretend to lather myself with fake soap. I landed every commercial, except one where I had to play kabaddi. I didn't know how!" she laughs.

'A SMART COOKIE'
All of this seems like another lifetime today, but it's helped keep the actress grounded. "Katrina lacks the snobbishness that comes with other heroines, who have PR managers screening their interactions," points out one female film journalist, "She's professional. Text her for an interview and she calls you back." Another male film reporter says, "She knows what to say. She's a smart cookieu00e2u0080u00a6 and one that doesn't crumble."

Make-up professional Clint Fernandes says it's Katrina's lack of starry airs that makes her a good friend. "We've gone out in rickshaws at night for ice-cream. I've known her since Boom. She's so simple. Once, she made her driver book tickets for us for No Entry and imagine my shock when I found it we were going to Gaiety-Galaxy.

She coolly walked in, but I got scared and said, 'Listen, I'm no Salman Khan to protect you with this crowd', and forced her to leave."

'INNOCENT YET SEXY'
If it was Salman who initially introduced to directors, Katrina's not telling. She built up confidence slowly, having her dialogues first dubbed by someone else, then making a go for it in Vipul Shah's Namastey London. "She fought with me continuously over dubbing," remembers the director, "First I had to convince her that people would relate more to her character if they heard her voice. I wanted that little accent creeping in. Then she would keep trying to perfect her dubbing until we were tearing our hair out. Left to her, she'd still be re-dubbing Namastey London.

"Katrina's got an innocent face, yet she's sexy; she's a foreigner and yet she's Indian," adds Vipul. She's obviously given hope to others Brazilian Giselle Monteiro passed off as a Punjabi kudi in Love Aaj Kal and Sri Lankan Jacqueline Fernandez is making her debut in Aladin.

Trade watcher Amod also says that Katrina's seen with huge sex appeal in India's small towns and audiences actually like that accent lining her dialogues. "There's always been room for the sophisticated heroine in Hindi cinema. Zeenat Aman kicked it off and then there was Parveen Babi. People say Katrina is getting close to Rs 3 crore per film and got Rs 1 crore for that small part in Blue."



MIX IT UP
For herself, Katrina says that now she's got an audience, she wants to do more urban, multiplex cinema like New York, Kaminey and Wake Up Sid. "I've earned that. If I don't do an Rs 80 crore film, I don't want people to say, 'She's slipping.'"

So apart from Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani and Priyadarshan's laugh riot De Dhana Dhan, Katrina's also starring in Prakash Jha's ambitious political drama Rajneeti, releasing in 2010. Her popularity's growing; more films, endorsements and even a deal to have a Barbie doll modeled on her, out this month. "It's special and iconic. I grew up in a house of six girls and we constantly fought over our Barbies. So at first, the idea was scary because I thought of some kid out there, tearing out the arm of a doll looking like me!"

Somehow, we don't think that's likely.



The man behind Katrina's success
You're thinking Salman Khan, but Katrina Kaif has a lot to thank Mohit Kumar Tugnait for. He's helped her with the Hindi films she's notched up by working on her rough-around-the-edges knowledge of the language. Tugnait has taught Katrina Hindi for nearly six years now, right from her Boom days, and still helps her get her diction and intonation right today. Here he tells us how Katrina picked up Hindi:

"When Katrina first met me, she knew nothing of the language, apart from perhaps the words 'main' and 'tum'. I started by teaching her the alphabet, but she's a hardworking girl. She wanted to learn Hindi by writing it in the Roman script, but I told her, 'You'll never be able to speak Hindi clearly this way.' Once she started on the alphabet, she picked it up in a couple of months the matras took her only a week. Then she started getting the flow of reading and writing.

"I told Katrina that the important thing was not just to talk Hindi, but to be able to understand and reply when people spoke to you in Hindi. I've taught acting for 25 years now; from Govinda to Hrithik Roshan to Kareena Kapoor and diction was always a part of the classes. Yet Katrina is the one student who knew Hindi the least. I convinced her to finally do her own dubbing for Namastey London and helped her dub her first scene in Hindi. She has a touch of a foreign accent in her Hindi and it works for when she plays an NRI girl. I've told her though that not every film will have an NRI girl.

"It feels good to see her success, but I still feel there's room for improvement. It may be that I'm too critical as a teacher and a normal audience may not even notice her pronunciation as much. She did a good job in New York and she's about 85-90 per cent right in her Hindi. I work on her dialogues the moment she gets a new script, on where to take a pause or show more emotion. That's the homework she works on for every film."

Katrina: If you ask, god will give it to you
Why Katrina Kaif is making fans and filmmakers happy?

In five years, Katrina Kaif has reached the top, without knowing a word of Hindi when she first came in or coming from a film family. She's had a string of hits since 2007, with the trade calling her a lucky charm. She hasn't done a film with Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan or Hrithik Roshan and hasn't worked with the industry's top directors. Where did she come from? How has she pulled it off?

Katrina calls it 'her destiny' and this includes meeting Salman Khan, the person she says guided her when she felt lost. You're inclined to believe her Katrina studied civil engineering until her teachers advised her to drop out and later, as an 18-year-old, she stood in queue with 300 models to land a soap commercial.

Katrina is a top heroine without having done a single film with...
Karan Johar
Farah Khan
Raju Hirani
Farhan Akhtar
Mani Ratnam
Aditya Chopra
Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Ashutosh Gowariker
Sooraj Barjatya

Why Katrina works, reveal audiences who make box-offices run

"I love Katrina when she's paired with Akshay Kumar. She's sweet, beautiful and I like her accent."
Zahangir Khan (24)

"I loved her in Partner. She speaks decent Hindi. I like her better than Kareena because I go by looks."
Hussain Khan (29)

On her I-pod
Maroon Five and Lifehouse

Favourite shopping destination
I'm a bad shopper, but I love Selfridges

Favourite love story
Gone With The Wind. Shows the unfortunate reality of relationships

Beauty tip
Drink lots of water. You are what you eat, so stay away from pizzas and chips

Place I'd like to visit before I die
Mexico. I'm always begging producers to shoot there