Priyanka Chopra Jonas: Scary to put out my truth for world to judge

Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Going through the pages of her memoir Unfinished, one realises how the road to success was daunting and difficult for Priyanka Chopra Jonas. From carving her niche in the largely nepotistic Bollywood to battling clichés about being the brown woman in the room in the West, she has chronicled intimate stories from her journey. A chunk of the memoir was written during the pandemic last year.

Considering almost everyone's emotions were heightened during the lockdown, did she view her personal journey from a different prism? "I wanted this book to not be about my achievements, but more about the moments and experiences that have shaped me. Since I started writing it when I was home for six months and had the ground beneath my feet, I treated it like a journal. A lot of introspection happened organically - a dissection of my failures, my sadness, and my struggles. It is my story in my own words. It's scary because I'm putting out my truth for the world to know and judge," says the actor.

Every celebrity has no-go zones in their lives. Where Chopra has given the unvarnished truth about undergoing a surgery to remove the polyp in her nasal cavity or being subjected to crude remarks from directors, she has kept certain experiences to herself, deeming them irrelevant. "I've opened up about the things that matter to me right now. I didn't edit my book, thinking ‘This is something I don't want to talk about'. If it is true to me at the moment, it's in the book. If it doesn't matter, it's not there."

The actor-producer has, with deep honesty, discussed battling depression for years after father Ashok Chopra's demise. Admitting that it was one of the toughest chapters to write, she says, "There are things that I have never spoken about, and there are tumultuous times that I will probably never speak about. Those chapters touch on things that I hadn't dealt with emotionally at the time and had forgotten, but was forced to remember when writing the book."

Unfinished ends with her becoming the executive producer of The White Tiger and having an Amazon deal in her kitty. She teases at a second volume as she says, "I remain ‘Unfinished'! I will continue to try new ideas and push the boundaries not for another book, but for myself."