Healing by fire

Actor Mandira Bedi says pottery helped her overcome a low phase in her life.

Controversies and gossip, one would imagine, wouldn’t deter celebrities. After all, it’s the price that comes with their public lives. Sometimes you wonder if they laugh about them as they pose for those Page 3 shutterbugs.

Actor/anchor Mandira Bedi, though, completely disagrees. She’s sitting far away from the maddening pace of Mumbai, for a reason, in a corner of a pottery studio. She has been going there for the past year and a half. “I was extremely upset and depressed after the 2007 World Cup,” she says, showing off the skills she has acquired in the time spent at the studio.

Working at the potter’s wheel, she is wearing a purple apron to avoid soiling her smart blue halter top. She continues: “Everything that could go wrong went wrong. India was out of the tournament in the first six days. I got embroiled in controversies and became a subject for unflattering media stories. To top it all a number of court cases were filed against me. It was a terrible, terrible phase.”

To those not clued in, here is a recap. It began with her wearing an image of the Indian tricolour below the waist on a sari, while anchoring during the tournament. Later, it was about sporting a tattoo of the Sikh symbol of unity of godhead, Ik Omkar and, finally, getting caught out with the fact that she gave Sikh names to her pet dogs.

She says she had to move to London temporarily till all the “dust settled down on all the allegations”. If getting involved in these controversies wasn’t enough, Bedi also suffered a personal tragedy, losing a close member of her family.

When she did finally return to Mumbai, she realised that she needed something — a passion — to focus her energies on. She hadn’t accepted any new assignments and the media, she recalls, was continuing to hound her to rake up the same issues again. That was when she met Anupama Pant, a potter, who has a studio — Earth to Fire — in Mumbai. Conversations with Pant kindled an interest in the art, and Bedi found herself walking up to the studio in the Khar area frequently.

“I was going through such a bad phase in my life, I couldn’t think of anything better than pottery,” says Bedi. Pant’s studio does attract more than its fair share of other celebrities, including actors like Dia Mirza and Samir Soni. She also has pupils who are corporate executives, housewives and senior citizens, and even children as young as four.

“I had thought about pottery but I don’t know what kept stopping me from pursuing it,” says Bedi, who says that in moments of distress she often imagined herself working with clay at a studio. She didn’t take much time to enroll there. As the learning process matured, she started creating vases, diyas, bowls and even tiles.

“My tile project,” she laughs, “is an ongoing one. So far, I’ve created and painted 30 tiles. They are plastered on a wall near the swimming pool at our beach house in Madh Island.” Each tile, it seems, takes nearly two hours to finish.

When she started with her pottery, she spent as much as two hours a day in the studio. “I wanted to be completely involved. I wanted to enjoy the process of creating something out of nothing. It is a magical experience, creating something with my own hands,” she says, sitting at the potter’s wheel, all set to create a ceramic bowl.

Earth to Fire offers customised ceramic ware, where one can choose pieces from a range of ready products and then paint on unique designs. Bedi, thus, learnt everything from scratch. “I thoroughly love it, especially putting pieces through the glaze-fire technique.” In her view, the art is very relaxing and therapeutic. “It has pulled me out of depression. What could be better than that?”

An extension of pottery has been her growing interest in painting. “I never painted on canvas earlier. So now, whenever I get even a little spare time, I try my hand at painting in oil colours.” Pottery hasn’t taken a back seat, but she does struggle to come to the studio at least twice a week. Apart from making bells for her mother (“My mother loves collecting bells from different parts of the world”) she has also made a lot of diyas and little clay Ganesh idols, which were given away during Diwali this year.

Bedi is awaiting the release of her new film Meerabai Not Out, where she essays the role of M S Dhoni. But before that she is thinking of making a milk jug. She’s wanted one for some time and doesn’t want to waste time shopping for it. You can understand, having your signature on your own creation is priceless.