LIFESTYLE INTERVIEW: PRIYANKA SINGHA
Indian Beauty Co-Host on Sony Television’s ‘Andaaz’
From Virgin America to Sony Television and beyond, former beauty pageant winner Priyanka Singha was always hopeful she'd have a seat awaiting her in the entertainment industry. As of a few weeks ago, that seat was keeping itself warm just for Priyanka, as the one-time flight attendant joined three of her friends on the set of Andaaz, a weekly lifestyle talk show in the vain of ABC’s The View. Hailed as the first lifestyle talk show targeting the South Asian Diaspora worldwide and starring four friends – Sarika Batra, Pavan Kochar, and Esha Bedi in addition to Priyanka -- Andaaz officially launched on October 9th.
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For Priyanka, her road to Andaaz was quite interesting -- a simple tale, really. Of course, as anyone in the entertainment industry can attest to, the path she embarked upon was not at all direct. Quite fittingly, she found herself traveling to every corner in the world, yet it was in the course of her travels that she met that proverbial contact who would allow Priyanka’s path to become a tad more linear.
"I met Sarika (Batra) about a year ago, and I was busy flying around as a flight attendant and doing my pageant thing,” Priyanka, who was the last host to join Andaaz, told Buzzine in an exclusive interview. “They were still looking for a fourth person to host their youth segment, and they brought me aboard.”
Things started to come into focus, even if ever so slightly, for the former Virgin America flight attendant who started to believe she was destined for quite the unique career when success found her on the beauty pageant circuit. Participating in three such events in a little more than a year, Priyanka found sufficient adventures in the entertainment industry to keep her going for eons.
“I had this desire that I wanted to perform, and I wondered to myself why I wasn’t doing it anymore, why did I stop?” Priyanka--who earned her undergraduate degree in international relations from University of California, Santa Cruz--rhetorically asked in her chat with Buzzine.
A dancer specializing in tap and kathak during her childhood days, the question she asked herself actually may not be as rhetorical as it originally sounded.
Her search for answers to that almost rhetorical question lead Priyanka to her first beauty pageant -- Miss Showbiz India. While she fell a tad short of claiming the throne of the Southern California-based pageant, Priyanka managed to find time between servicing Virgin America flights to participate in the Miss India Northern California event.
“After that, I realized I didn’t want to do the corporate 9-to-5 thing. I am a free spirit; I want to be out there in the world and interacting with people,” Priyanka candidly told Buzzine. “I mean, yeah, I was kind of corporate at Virgin, but I also had auditions of Miss India Northern California. I figured, I love this flight attendant thing, but I decided I wanted to do more and do things that make me happy. I also want to help others achieve their dreams as well.”
Apparently Priyanka’s epiphany worked out well, as the flight attendant soon became a beauty pageant winner as she was crowned Miss India Northern California.
The title put her in a position to continue on beyond her Northern California roots, where she essentially grew up -- in the San Francisco Bay Area -- to participate in the Miss India USA pageant in Florida.
Surprise, surprise--Priyanka’s winning streak continued as Bollywood actress Neha Dupia fitted her head for the Miss India USA crown. With two North American beauty pageants under her belt, Priyanka had one last stop -- Durban, South Africa for Miss India Worldwide.
While she did not claim the title of “Queen” at that pageant, no doubt Priyanka had done enough for her entertainment career to start distancing herself from the days she spent as a flight attendant, irrespective of how much she enjoyed the gig.
It also helped that Priyanka was out of her element well before her beauty pageant days, as the newest Andaaz co-host learned a few new perspectives about life as a college freshman.
“I am a city girl at heart, but I wanted to try a new environment. My first year (at UC Santa Cruz) was kind of interesting because it was a hippie environment,” she quirkily recalled. “But it mellowed me out and gave me a lot of balance in life.”
Such balance paid off soon after returning from South Africa, as Priyanka reminisced about her meeting Sarika, who is one of the producers of Andaaz, and realized she was making the right career choice by joining the program. Just as the beauty pageants hit her one after another with breakneck speed, it did not take long for Priyanka to find herself in another whirlwind of activity with Andaaz.
Of course, it is a program she is thrilled to be a part of, as the weekly talk show modeled after The View attempts to tackle, through the eyes of four women, some of the most relevant issues affecting South Asians around the world.
“It was very organic. We just meshed well. It was supposed to happen this way; kind of meant to be,” she humbly stated, adding how all four women on the show are similar enough to understand each other yet different enough to offer differing perspectives on any given issue. “We are four hosts -- four friends with different perspectives. That being said, we have so much in common.”
Even more, Priyanka hopes Andaaz is something more than four female friends offering their respective opinions or thoughts on any given issue. In talking amongst each other and the many celebrities who appear on the show (such as Sex and The City’s Max Ryan and Hisss’s Mallika Sherawat), Priyanka hopes the entire South Asian community will take away something of substantive significance.
“Essentially, that is what we are going to get across -- what we are eventually trying to do is to have the South Asian community be able to relate to something and for South Asians to have a voice,” Priyanka intelligibly pointed out. “We are going to try to do as many celebrities as possible, but we want to be able get as many stories as possible which our audience can relate to.”
To find out whether you can relate to Priyanka’s story after reading this feature piece, be sure to tune into Andaaz and listen in to what she--as well as Sarika, Pavan, and Esha--have to say about their interpretations of the meaning of life and everything.
