Photographer: Vibhor Pradeep Chandra

I don’t intend to bad-mouth India, but I am concerned having seen the condition.

Linda Evangelista, in the country recently to lend her name to the cause of HIV/AIDS, surprised Nupur Mahajan Sinh with the fierceness of conviction that she has about the cause she has lent her name to....

You don’t think much when you walk in to meet a supermodel. Beauty and brains are a rare combo. You would presume that she’d want to talk about beauty and make-up tips, what she likes to eat and not eat, all the while looking like a million bucks and fluttering her lashes. And given that this was supermodel Linda Evangelista, who features in the international press every other day, my homework was admittedly poor. I was sure I knew it all.

Well, here was an absolutely stunning woman (press pictures of Evangelista opening London and Milan Fashion Weeks, don’t do her justice), dressed in knee-caressing jeans and a black top, her long legs neatly packed below her butt. She’s gorgeous, I thought, as she busied herself with our shoot. She was concerned about the lighting, about her make-up being touched up and also approved the shots personally. I masked my ‘Garfieldish’, know-it-all smile and noted her concern for perfection. But, it didn’t escape my attention that there was no fluttering of lashes, uncalled for giggling or any coquettish behaviour.

In five minutes, she was back in the same posture and I waited for the lashes routine. Only, she looked on straight and asked me, her voice raised loud enough to encompass a pitch of concern and even amusement, what the hell Indian authorities were doing about AIDS? And I awoke from my supermodel slumber. “I am absolutely disappointed in the healthcare facilities in India. I am sure, even though I’ve been here for hardly three days, that enough is not being done.”

Evangelista spent a day with sex workers, in Mumbai, distributing condoms and talking to them about safe sex. “They are smart women. They knew what I was there to tell them and were practicing it already! I feel the sex workers are smarter here than in the West, they have a lot of knowledge. In fact, I went with a certain fixed mindset and came away pleasantly surprised.” And then, as though realising that she’d let her guard down and opened up way too much, she justified herself. “I didn’t come here to judge. The reason I got involved with charities was to go around the world and see things for what they truly are and then translate my opinions to the rest of the world, in order to gather support. I don’t intend to bad-mouth India, I am only concerned at the condition.”

I try to justify that. We are just too many of us and maybe that hardens us to death, disease, calamity and even human life. I talk to her of movies like My Brother Nikhil and how India is waking up to AIDS awareness. But a true story of a family throwing out their own blood, when affected by HIV, draws another groan. “How can you do that? In which world does that happen? My mother would give me both her kidneys if the need arises.... I am so lucky.

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