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MUMBAI : Mandira Bedi is a well-known cricket presenter, having starred in the first-ever Indian daily soap opera Shanti (1994). The 52-year-old actor recently talked about how she got the position of anchor. She commented on the adverse impacts of becoming a sports presenter on her acting career, saying in a recent interview, “a lot of things in my life happened because I was at the right place at the right time.”
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In an interview with the popular news portal Mandira Bedi recalled, “In 2002, India beat England and made it to semi-finals of a tournament called the Champions Trophy… Now, because I love cricket, I decided to travel to Sri Lanka to watch the match. So, I booked a ticket for myself and reached there…” She said that people from Sony saw her there and were curious to know why she’d spent her own money to attend the tournament. “At that time, they were flying down celebrities to watch the cricket, and I came but bought my own ticket. They just had me at the back of their mind as someone who really likes cricket.”
She continued, “So, when they wanted a female anchor for the 2003 World Cup, they just called me randomly. As soon as I reached there, I had a bunch of people shooting cricket questions at me, I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ They asked me, ‘Would you be interested in hosting the cricket World Cup? I was like, ‘Would I be interested? Yes!’ But it wasn’t as easy as that. There were three auditions, and over thousand other women auditioned for this gig.”
Mandira said that she eventually became so popular as a host that she stopped getting acting offers. She said, “After that, I was only getting offers for anchoring jobs and MC jobs and everybody forgot that I was an actor, and that I’d done eight years of acting before. After the gig, even if I got any acting role, it would always be about being an anchor and to play a cricket commentator and to play a cricket presenter, and I was like, ‘You have forgotten, but I know acting, I am an actor. I started my career as an actor.'”
She struggled as a host in addition to the acting roles drying up. “We didn’t have social media, where you could see people’s comments at that time. We did have internet, but not like now. Sony kept me away from all this. They said, ‘You are not allowed to know what people are saying’. They shut all that out for me. What I did learn from the cricket time is that there’ll be people who like you in life and then there will be people in life who won’t like you. So the ones who like you, be grateful about them and the ones who don’t, don’t try and please them,” she said.
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Credit- The Indian Express
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