Yesterday was like a river in spate. Creativity was at its prime. Poets, professors, artists, musicians - men from disparate backgrounds were drawn to the magical world of movies. Passion coursed through their veins. They had stories to tell. Of love and loss. And, at the centre of all their adulation was the Indian Heroine. Through the '50s and '60s they wrote stories for her that were more shrines in her honour and they presented her with rare incandescence because, for many of them it was a labour of love. In film after film they immortalised her. Madhubala, Meena Kumari, Waheeda Rehman, Nargis, Sadhana and Nutan, giving them a life forever....

Today, it's like the river ran dry. Memories of yesterday are nothing but a faint watermark. A measure of how far we've fallen. Films are either "Fulltoo Time-Pass" or tired tales warmed up again and again.

And what of the Indian Heroine? She's the worst casualty of our time. In this age of aggression, of 'Emancipation' and the 'War of the Sexes', she's been turned into just a sexual being. Her in-your-face sexuality has transformed her into something of a predator. Today, all that young actresses desire is to grow up to be 'Helen Aunty'. The ultimate measure of your desirability is to be invited to do an 'item number'. They're recycling Helen's songs with rather alarming consequences. Almost everybody today is killing you softly with his interpretation of a classic.

You could understand the ambivalence one felt, when earlier against this backdrop, Pradeep Sarkar announced he was remaking the Bimal Roy classic, Parineeta, with a model and small-time actress called Vidya Balan, who, till yesterday, sold low-cost detergent on TV. What's the guy doing? Trying to sail paper boats in the deep blue sea?

But Sarkar persevered.

And despite the initial hiccups, Parineeta got made. And hit the theatres…. What happened next was unprecedented.

Pradeep Sarkar's exquisitely nuanced Parineeta (married woman) was like a whisper. She took your breath away. Wasn't she the one you were seeking all along, without even knowing it? It was like she had stepped out of time. She had the same, clear-eyed luminescence of Waheeda Rehman. The quite intimacy of her gaze and that searing sense of self and grace reminded you of a time lost.

The euphoria over Vidya Balan's arrival was cathartic. She swept every Best Debut award in the country. And film-makers began fashioning spaces for her in their films. Vinod Chopra Productions snapped her up for their sequel to the iconic Munnabhai MBBS and Eklavya with Amitabh Bachchan. Nikhil Advani signed her opposite John Abraham for his Salaam-E-Ishq, 'Mani Sir' called in from down South adding her to the cast of his Abhishek Bachchan-Aishwarya Rai starrer, Guru. Priyadarshan's signed her in a Tamil remake in which she plays a slightly schizophrenic woman who imagines she was a dancer in her past life…. If they untangle some of the knots, she may be doing Pritish Nandy's Raahgir, a remake of Guide…. Subhash Ghai's keen on signing her up for his next...

She's not just the flavour of the season. She is the season.

That's why, it's not easy to meet her. She's everywhere and nowhere. You see her on events on TV, she's on the grapevine in the papers. She's travelling to a city a day, doing promotions, inaugurations, films! It's hard to catch her mid-flight…Finally, we decide to rendezvous at Fame Adlabs (Andheri), the next day, where she's meeting the winners of a 'Munnabhai SMS contest'.