Kashmera Shah on Difference, Defiance and Doing Things Her Way
There are interviews where you spend the first ten minutes politely warming each other up. This was not one of them. Within minutes of meeting Kashmera, we’ve covered skin colour, rejection, being the odd one out, Bollywood, witches and why she feels at home on opposite sides of the world.
“Every time I’m in Mumbai, I miss America. Every time I’m in America, I miss Mumbai,” she tells me. “I’m the kind of wife who has two husbands and can never decide which is better.”
That pretty much sets the tone to a candid conversation.
Kashmera is funny, direct and gloriously uninterested in wrapping every opinion in a pretty bow.
She has been acting since the 1990s, appeared across film and reality television, written and directed her own work and returned to television alongside husband Krushna Abhishek in Laughter Chefs – Unlimited Entertainment, where their on-screen sparring became part of the fun. Now she is moving further behind the camera, writing and directing new vertical productions and looking beyond India to create work with an increasingly international cast.
But to understand where she is going, you have to understand something about where she started. Because being different was never something Kashmera had the luxury of ignoring.
You said you grew up in a very fair-skinned family. When did you first become aware that you looked different?
“Very young. My mother is very fair. She looks German. My grandmother was one of the whitest women I had ever seen. And here I was, this dark child who stood out. I knew I was different. Negatively, you can look at that and think it is a bad thing. Positively, I stood out in the pictures. You couldn’t take your eyes off me. That became something I understood about myself early.”
And then you entered an industry where skin colour was hardly irrelevant.
“Exactly. I remember going for a Fair & Lovely advertisement in around 1993 or 1994. I was selected because I was dark. The idea was that I would use their product and become fair and lovely. I was one of the final two.
At that time I was very poor. This would have been a major campaign for me. I would have been everywhere. They explained the campaign and I remember saying, ‘Okay, the money is good, but does it have to be Fair & Lovely?’
“They looked at me like, What is this girl, all of 21, saying? They basically ignored me and another very well-known model walked in and she got the campaign. I wasn’t upset that I didn’t get it. But it showed me where my country was in the 90s. Fair and lovely meant you were pretty.”
Did experiences like that make you want to fit in more – or do the opposite?
“I always thought about it differently. A lion and a shark are both hunters. But a lion can’t hunt in the ocean and a shark can’t hunt on the ground. Does that make either one less of a predator? No. You have to know where you belong. We are all different. The same things are boring. Different is what stands out.”
Your family had rather different plans for you, though.
“I was very good at my studies. I grew up in a matriarchal family and my mother and grandmother thought I was going to be a doctor. I tell them they got part of it right.
Not doctor. Actor.
And acting is probably the place where you find maximum rejection. But I thought, if you’re going to get rejected in life, get rejected at the best place. Then, when you make it there, you know you can do anything. That has been a motto of my life.”
Did Bollywood try to put you into another kind of box?
“During my first five years in the film industry, from about 1995 to 2000, I realised I was getting more of the negative characters because I was sexy. If you’re hot, you’re a bitch.
That was basically it. But I didn’t want to hide that part of myself either. Sometimes they would say, ‘You need to wear a one-piece swimsuit.’ And I’d reply, ‘Why am I wearing a swimsuit? Give me a bikini. I have a damn hot body. If you want me to look the best, let me look the best.’
They’d look at me as if I was crazy. I wasn’t going to pretend to be less. I think my great grandmother was among the witches that they could not burn or get rid of. So I am that “witch” that is here to stay.”
“We are all different. Same things are boring. Different is what stands out.”
Now, she gets to call the shots
There is something rather satisfying about talking to a woman who spent years being told which character to play, what to wear and how she should look – and hearing her talk about sitting in the director’s chair. In 2019, Kashmera stepped behind the camera for her feature directorial debut, Marne Bhi Do Yaaron. Now she is preparing to direct again, this time in a format she admits she hadn’t even heard of until recently: verticals.
So what exactly is a vertical? You have to explain this one to me.
“I didn’t know either! Everybody is on their phone now. We’re watching reels, we’re scrolling. So they have started making movies for the phone. You can have a story that’s around an hour long, but it is broken into two-minute episodes. Instead of watching the film horizontally, you’re watching it vertically. I’ve been hired to direct two of them.
The budgets aren’t big, so a lot of people will shoot them in a studio and finish them very quickly. But me being me, I thought: Let’s do this and I want to go to Greece.
I don’t want to sit in a studio. My first film was shot there.
I want to give back to the people who were good to me and the people that helped me when I needed it the most. The people of Kavala and Thasos opened up their arms and hearts towards my small production and I was able to launch the trailer of my film in Cannes 2019 opening the Indian pavilion with it. I love Greece.”
You’re also deliberately giving opportunities to actors who haven’t had their big break yet.
“Yes. Two of my actors are young. They’ve been trying to fit into Hollywood, going to auditions, and they haven’t made it so far. So I put them in the lead. You need to have your dreams come true. Feel the lead. Become the lead. I don’t mind placing my bets on you.
One day, whether you become famous or not, you will still know that you did this work. You flew all the way to Greece and you were the lead. I want to work with people from different countries. I want my work to become global. And yes, I’m going to be hiring a lot of men who I can tell what to do. I enjoy that part, too.”
She laughs. Of course she does.
The fortune we keep spending
The conversation eventually turns to something that seems to sit underneath a lot of Kashmera’s decisions these days: time.
Not age. Time. There’s a difference.
She remembers watching Sylvester Stallone giving his daughters a piece of advice on television: Time is your only fortune. It stuck.
Has your relationship with time changed over the years?
“I have always believed in it, because we don’t know when we’re going to die.
People keep saying, ‘Time is running out.’ Time is not running out. You are running out. That’s different. I went to China recently with my architect to help him out with the gadgets that we want to buy to put in my kitchen of the new house. He’s much younger than me and he spent hours shopping and bargaining and eventually bought one tiny thing.
I said, ‘You spent five hours and bought one small thing. Why?’ He said he wanted a good bargain. But sometimes the bargain isn’t worth your time. If you don’t like something, move on. Time moves with you.”
“People say time is running out. Time is not running out.
You are running out.”
There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about that. We can spend years waiting until we’re ready. Until we’re liked. Until somebody picks us. Until the timing is better, the children are older, the body is smaller, the bank account is bigger or everyone around us finally approves. And then one day we discover we’ve been spending the one thing we couldn’t replace.
Kashmera isn’t interested in doing that anymore.
“No” will do nicely
You say you’re very upfront. Has that got you into trouble over the years?
“People think I’m rude half the time. They think, ‘Oh, she’ll tell you off.’ But I’m not interested in maintaining a good relationship with everybody just for the sake of it. I love my own company. I’ve never been bored alone. I’ve been bored in a setting of people. I can be at a party and feel like the loneliest person there. I’m friendly. I’m approachable. But I also believe that no is a full sentence. Women are still remarkably good at turning a perfectly adequate two-letter word into a paragraph.
No, because…
No, I’m sorry…
No, I would absolutely love to, but…”
So no explanation required?
“No. And if you have to say yes, say, ‘Yes – but not with you.’” She laughs.
Make the rejection useful
What I like most about Kashmera isn’t that she has somehow reached the magical stage where rejection, criticism and other people’s opinions no longer exist. They do. She’s simply decided they don’t get to run the show. How good is that?
What would you say to the woman who is holding herself back because she’s frightened of criticism or rejection?
“Use it. Rejection and negativity are fuel. If you’re scared of something, go towards it. When somebody tells me no, I think, Now that you’ve said no, I’m going to do it. And I’m going to do it so well that you’ll wish you were my friend. Even the people who hate you are watching you.
So what? Nobody talks about the people who gave up.
When you hear somebody’s success story, there were probably 800 failures before that. We just don’t talk about them. That is what people need to understand. You keep going.”
Perhaps that is the thread running through Kashmera’s career. The woman who was directed for years now gets to say, “Cut” on her terms. She embraced Different until it became successful.
Kashmera has no interest in becoming easier to categorise.
Thank goodness for that. She’d be far less interesting if she did.
Name: Kashmera Shah
Professional Title: Actor, writer and director
Bio: Kashmera Shah is an Indian actor, filmmaker and producer with a three-decade career across film, television and reality entertainment. From Yes Boss and Wake Up Sid to Bigg Boss and Laughter Chefs, she has continually reinvented herself, expanding into writing, directing and producing while forging her own path in entertainment. She is now moving further behind the camera, writing and directing new productions with an increasingly international creative focus. Beyond acting and filmmaking, she continues to develop original films, digital content, and production ventures, while pursuing her interests in fitness, design, travel, and entrepreneurship.
