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| The actor sports a new role |
| Neha Bhatt / New Delhi Jul 19, 2009, 00:44 IST |
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Away from the silver screen, Chitrangda Singh tries her hand at everything from golf to snorkeling to scuba-diving to, now, skydiving.
 Some people enjoy playing a sport, or two or even three. Others consume it as a steady diet, watching cricket on television, or Wimbledon live. But actor Chitrangda Singh is a sports junkie, a glutton for variety, flirtatious with her loyalty.
But it’s something she takes little credit for, laying the blame of the degustation platter at husband, golfer Jyoti Randhawa’s door. Sports couldn’t have eluded Singh for long anyway. “I feel most connected to golf,” — naturally — “mainly because of the appreciation I have developed for the game. It’s a lonely sport and the kind of restraint, controlled aggression and motivation it requires is crazy. The whole process of mastering the game is really something,” she struggles to explain.
Singh’s mien is sporty, something you’d associate with a childhood devoted to playing outdoors. She denies it though. “A little bit of swimming,” she recalls, “the regular stuff that everyone does in school, nothing else.” But with her marriage, “I’m discovering my love for sports,” she says. She’s currently pledged her fidelity to a daily round of golf, something she agrees she’s actually getting good at.
Far away from the sea, distanced even by a sparse monsoon so far, she’s as far removed from the idea of watersports as anyone in a Gurgaon penthouse can be. But it’s where a bit of her sporting heart is. She’s taken up “watersports such as scuba-diving and snorkelling”, and though it has nothing to do with water, and everything to do with shooting, “also skeet shooting”, which might be an interest that’s been passed on by her brother Digvijay.
But to get back underwater, Singh recently went scuba-diving and snorkelling in Bali and Phuket along with her husband, and talks nostalgically of the “gorgeous blue and green waters, and towering rocks”, but this wasn’t her first scuba-diving experience. That was five years ago, in Sanya, China. “Our guide took us to this island where we were to go scuba-diving. The moment I went underwater, I felt uncomfortable. I realised my oxygen tank was empty! And as I kept bobbing my head out of the water to indicate that something was wrong, my guide kept gesturing that I should go deeper. He thought I was panicking because I was a first-timer. It took a while to understand that I was trying to indicate an empty tank. It was a scary experience!”
But no more scarier than when she almost took the big jump in Australia. “I backed out when they asked me to sign the ‘risk’ form for bungee jumping,” she sighs at the lost opportunity, but “perhaps another time”. Not that it’s put her off sports that combine high-adrenaline experiences with heights. In fact, her preoccupation with skydiving has led to her involvement in starting up a skydiving company. Titled The Edge, Singh has invested in the company along with her husband and brother. “This project is very new at the moment. Plus, the sport is new in the country,” the actress observes. The company has acquired an airstrip at Sagar, in Madhya Pradesh, and infrastructure is being shared from Chimes Aviation Academy. “We had out first camp recently, but we learnt that this isn’t the best time because of the weather. So we’ll have our next set of camps once it gets cooler. We are also looking at acquiring more air strips so that people can enjoy the experience in different stretches,” she adds.
Singh, who made her debut in the 2005 Sudhir Mishra film Hazaron Khwaishein Aisi before going AWOL, returned with Sorry Bhai, and is now preparing to shoot for Mishra’s next, Dhruv, with a strict but flexible exercise regime, something she says helps her build her stamina for her round of golf too. Her workouts focus on high impact aerobics. “I use extra steps and lighter weights, a little bit of running and cardio,” she says. She does not use a personal trainer. “Most times, trainers ask you to follow a workout pattern blindly even though it may not suit your body. So I’ve devised my own workout pattern over the years since I have learnt what works best for me.”
Another part of her exercise regime is a little more unusual, and something she doesn’t get to do in her movies: dancing to Bollywood music. The workouts all add up, she says, to keeping her fit for sports. Second only to her interest in golf is tennis, but in this case she’s a viewer rather than a player, and prefers staying off court. She’s hoping Roger Federer will claim his 15th Grand Slam on the day we meet. He does.
As she hits the ball on the golf course, Singh might be focusing on the distance she has to cover, but in another part of her brain, another idea is already bubbling: she wants to go deep sea diving, to see another underwater world, in Lakshwadeep this time. If only the rains would end!
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