Don’t take them at face value. Several leading actresses in Mollywood have shown themselves to be keen businesswomen too. So, if Poornima Indrajith, a fashionista in her own right and designer-in-chief of fashion store Pranaah, was the lone name in the list till recently, Kavya Madhavan, Lena, Kaniha, Shwetha Menon, Rima Kallingal and the like too have joined the fray to establish their credentials as entrepreneurs.

While Kavya owns Laksyah, an online fashion store, Rima runs Mamangam, a dance school in Kochi. Lena is busy with Aakruti, her weight-loss centre. Kaniha’s focus is on health care, as a franchise partner of Medall Diagnostics in Chennai. Shwetha, meanwhile, has opened a restaurant, Shwe’s Delight, in Dubai. Mallika Sukumaran owns Spice Boat, a restaurant in Doha, Qatar… The actresses talk at length to MetroPlus about why and how they went about it, the lessons they learnt and what lies ahead.

For Kavya it was the realisation of a long-cherished dream; of starting a business venture while she is at the peak of her career. “I zeroed in on a fashion boutique from several other options, such as dance school, beauty parlour, restaurant…,” says Kavya. “It was the safest and best choice because my father had been in the textile business back home in Neeleeswaram for nearly four decades. My brother, Midhun is a graduate in fashion technology and my mother and my sister-in-law too share the same passion. Laksyah is really a family-run enterprise,” she adds. Laksyah, which sells a range of one-off designer saris and daily wear and based out of Kochi, will be celebrating its first anniversary next month.

It was a photoshoot that lead Lena to open Aakruti. She had to lose a few kilos to get in shape for the shoot and her childhood friend, Louisa David, a physiotherapist, helped her achieve that goal. “I was happy with my weight loss and so we decided to launch a physiotherapy-based slimming centre. Louisa has been running her centre at Thrissur for five years and she helped me start Aakruti, in Chevayur, Kozhikode, in September last year,” Lena says.

Kaniha, always a multi-tasker, has a solid reason for taking the health care route too. It was the closest she could get to her childhood ambition to pursue medicine! “After coming back to India from the United States, my husband, Shyam Radhakrishnan and I wanted to start something. Since I couldn’t fulfil my dream of becoming a doctor and had to study engineering instead, I thought I should do something related to healthcare and that’s how Medall happened,” says the actress.

In Shwetha’s case, her restaurant was a venture waiting to happen. “In fact, those who know me for long are not surprised with my decision to open a restaurant. I am an absolute foodie. I am so very careful about what I eat that my cook always travels with me on my shoots. I also love hosting family and friends and often hold pyjama parties at home. That’s why a restaurant was the obvious choice when I thought about starting a venture,” says Shwetha. Shwe’s Delight [“I was called Shwe by my friends in modelling circuit”], which opened its doors last month, is a North Indian fine dining restaurant. “I wanted to give expatriate Malayalis in Dubai a different taste from the usual fare. We dish up a bit of Chinese food too,” she adds.

Being a celebrity helps, most of the time, especially to get publicity, say the leading ladies. For instance, Kaniha says she could bank upon her celebrity status to get corporate tie-ups. They also talk of brand value going up when a known face opens a venture. “There is a certain level of trust with potential customers because you are a known face,” explain Shwetha and Lena. “On the flipside, you are always under scrutiny. At times, I feel acting is much easier,” adds Shwetha. Kavya says it is not easy being the face of Laksyah. “I can’t go wrong with what I wear!” she adds, with a laugh.

Celeb status and a pretty face, though, is no guarantee for a successful business. All the actresses say that they put in a lot of hard work to get their businesses up and running. “The execution part was not easy, be it finding the right location, getting the interiors done, purchasing the machinery, appointing qualified staff, training them and even finalising the colour of the uniform. But I have become more confident now that we are opening a new branch in Kochi,” explains Lena. Kaniha, meanwhile, admits that she has learnt to be “more patient and be diplomatic.” Well played.Read more at:www.marieaustralia.com/cheap-formal-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/****-formal-dresses

"In the borderless kingdom of poetry,
poet is the emperor"
KALIDASA (Sanskrit classical poet circa,3Cen BCE)


His words
"Apare,  Kavya Samsare,
Kavireva  prajapati"

The other day when you told me that
You had ran out of the inspiration
To write anymore,
I stood holding the mirror in front of you
While you stood there,
Just blankly gazing at the shiny silver screen
Oblivious of how to search for something inspiring
In the scrapes of something so obvious.
I still stood there holding the mirror
Though the pain in my arms had now
Crawled up to the cliff of my shoulders.
I saw your riveting beauty across
The oceanic stretches of your mushy skin
The crevices that made imperfect turns and curves
The layers of hair that sat on the plateau of your shoulders,
Occasionally peeking in from behind the ears
Or even the plump lips of yours
With the tectonic cracks that flaunted the brown musk.
The inspiration sat hidden in between
The stretch marks and the stress marks
Inside the pimples or even
In between the chubby folds of your being.
My mom used to say when I stood in front of the mirror
Just like you are standing now, with a downward curve of your lips
And shoulders that are drooping at the lowest
That, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder
And now that she is long gone, I reciprocate her words to you, swapping beauty with inspiration.
The world remains the same, it's the perception that takes a leap,
Just like a story comes to life when told by a dramatic teller,
The usual springs to life when looked at with eyes searching for inspiration.

- Kavya Mukhija

i. The world is burning.
A little above the place that
Seeks the greatest blessing of the sun,
It is burning with grenades and bombs
Flying around like table tennis *****
With children sleeping to the lullaby
Of their parents'cries.

ii. The world is burning.
A little far away from my house
Around the nook of the street
A group of humans are fighting
They're burning and getting burnt
The fire consumes their body
And the ego their soul.

iii. So when I asked mom to
Go to that nook that reeks of fire crackers
To buy the ice cream blue lagoon,
She kept staring at me
The way she would whenever I'd ask for too much.
I showed her the red colour thread that she had forcefully tied around my neck
Because she had said that it would protect me all the time
I kept waiting for her to utter a word
But she didn't say anything
And I didn't go
To the place that was burning.

iv. I saw on TV the flames that hugged the top of the houses
And danced on scooters
Making them blacker than charcoal,
Near my house at the corner of the street.
There were bodies on the street,
Frozen like sleeping statues.
They had those threads
Wound around their hands and necks
Not one but tens of them.

v. It's night time now.
I sleep hugging her
As tightly as my fragile muscles permitted.
The coldness of her body tingles my fingertips
And the roughness stings.
There are noises of people arguing
In the background.
But I,
I don't care.
Because they're burning the world
And my world is already burnt.

- Kavya Mukhija

She is made up of scars,
Hidden with the skin of elegance,
She is a captive,
To others' perception of her own fallacies.
She is made up of bruises,
Knitted with the yarn of invasion,
Her eyes reflect the burning agony,
She is the flowing torrent.
She is made up of blemishes,
Concealed with layers of optimism,
She is made up of bewitching beauty;
A crude exposure.
She is an enticing amalgamation of-
Rain and blizzard,
Oceans and waterfalls,
Breeze and vacuum,
She is a world of paradoxes,
Sealed with an air of rigidity.

- Kavya Mukhija

Opposites attract.
I had learnt the year in which I learnt to tie my shoelaces
And differentiate between the left and the right
But still not between the wrong and the right.
And may be, that is why on nights
When I pulled the blanket of pin-drop silence over myself,
My mind swayed back to my past,
And
As the night darkened and the silence deepened,
So did my thoughts; become
Vicious.
Fluid flows from high potential to low potential.
I had learnt the year in which I understood
The difference between the right and the wrong,
And may be
This is why my mind drifted back to my past
On sunny days and sparkling evenings.
And
Today, when I sit across the table with my hand in yours and sip the freshly brewed latte,
I am happy that
The past that haunted me was the 'low'
And
The place I'm in right now is the 'right'.

- Kavya Mukhija, 2018.

The lullaby you used to sing,
Still echoes in my ears.
It sticks with me on nights when I wake up terrified
From a nightmare too horrific than any Annabelle sequel,
And caresses my hair
It's touch calming down every cell of my body.
And when on nights I become too scared
By the unusual howls coming from across the road,
Your lullaby like the command fed into the computer,
Continues to straighten the creases on my forehead,
With the love that pours from your voice.
The syllables fall from your lips like pearls
Weave a necklace of confidence
And hang it around my neck.
The song you used to sing has been stuck in my mind
Like the strongest adhesive,
Simultaneously joining the torn pieces of my soul.
And when on some nights I sleep well,
I dream of you,
Rocking me to sleep in your lap,
Singing the lullaby you used to sing.

- Kavya Mukhija

She was a phoenix in her heart
So she burned into ashes every time
Yet she rose each day to a new life
With a fire inside her,
And Alas, I could see
It could burn them all alive

-Kavya Leo