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Cute and charming

Fresh appeal Swetha Prasad wins hearts

Swetha Basu Prasad is just 17 and she is currently the latest heart throb of college goers in Andhra. When producer Dil Raju selected her as the heroine of Kotta Bangaru Lokam, industrywallahs warned him that it could be a wrong move. Raju says, ‘she is not very glamorous or heroine material but there is something very cute about her, and we needed a teenager for the film and after seeing Iqbal we thought she was perfect for the role of Swapna. She has not only come up with a great performance but has grabbed the entire credit from the audiences.”

Swetha hails from a mixed parentage, her father is from UP and mother from Bengal. At 12, she was the National Award winner for her dual role in Makdee and her acting repertoire includes Iqbal and a Bengali movie Eknotir Golpo with Mithun Chakraborthy. Currently soaking in the success of her first film as a heroine, the petite and perky teenager says she was not given the script in advance and had to memorise her lines on the day the shooting began. In fact they kept improvising and jumbling up her dialogues on the spot but since she is blessed with a good memory it didn’t become much of a problem. “I haven’t done even a small skit in school,” says Swetha who is at the moment in the XI standard. Her parents do have a theatre background but that’s about it.

How has the response been to her work? Swetha had watched the film on the first day with her parents, crew and finds the response very overwhelming and adds that people are heaping her with additional praise for her ‘voice’, for one of the song in KBL which was actually sung by Swetha Pandit but was misprinted as Swetha Prasad on the album. “People are calling me and asking me to sing the song, initially I didn’t understand.”

Swetha cites her favourite scene in the film is when she tells Varun how she would like to be a free bird. She quips, “I was given five different ways to project the feelings and I liked the way I pulled it off . Also I liked Brahmanandam Sir’s work, he was so funny.” Her next film is in Hindi but she wouldn’t like to talk about it. She firmly says that she’ll sign a Telugu film only if the content is good and her character is something that connects with the audiences.

The young lady is all praise for her mother, whom she considers her best friend. She adds, “She has a fantastic insight, she is such a strong woman, full of positivity. I’m her reflection, very much like her.”

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