Basking in well-deserved success after Ghajini, in between shooting a song for London Dreams and doing commercials, Asin is fresh as a daisy

You are flooded with endorsements now.
Life is pretty much the same; I’ve been doing ads since 14. So far, I have done around 50 ads including Parachute, BPL Mobile, Mirinda and Colgate. Most of the commercials you are seeing now have been signed much before Ghajini.

Do you get mobbed in Mumbai?
I think people in Mumbai are really cool. When they see me, they wave out or greet me. But when I was shooting for London Dreams in Chandigarh, I got a taste of North India. The crowd was encouraging and kept calling out my name. If I didn’t respond to Asin, they would resort to Kalpana. I loved the food there, specially the aloo parathas.

What difference do you find between the Mumbai and the South film industries?
The South industry has a lot more sense of punctuality. They start early and wrap up by a particular time. I’m used to that and make it a point to be on time for a shoot or an event. In Ghajini, the entire unit was from the South, so in that sense, there was no difference. London Dreams is the first complete Bollywood unit I’m working with. Most of it has been shot in London and Paris and each of us got a bound script, besides the shoot schedule including the sunrise, sunset, weather forecast, temperature, site-map of the location, reporting time and such. For the first time I was introduced to the concept of ADs (assistant directors) with walkie-talkies on the sets of Ghajini. It was odd to hear them telling each other ‘loading Kalpana on the set’, ‘walking Kalpana’. I used to tell them I’m not a thing to be addressed like that.

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