On a blistering afternoon in Mumbai, Kona Kona feels unusually calm. The lunch rush has thinned, the sunlight outside is sharp enough to bounce off the parked cars, and inside the restaurant the cool air offers some relief from the summer. Then Mona Singh walks in.
“Drink something?” she asks immediately. “It’s such a hot day.”
There is none of the tight choreography of celebrity around her — no visible entourage, no one hovering with instructions, no nervous glances at a watch. Eventually when she sits down to talk, Singh first checks that everyone has been fed and looked after. The disarming simplicity is easy to misread as guilelessness. It isn’t. Singh has been in the industry for more than two decades, long enough to have worked across television, films and streaming, long enough to have seen fame arrive in waves.
She knows the game. She just doesn’t seem particularly interested in playing it.
The Jassi Effect
“I always wanted to act. I had no plan B,” she says, tracing the start of a career that began with television’s most unlikely breakthrough. “I told my parents I was going to Mumbai to try my luck, and they said you can go — but only when you get something concrete. So, I kept auditioning and going back home to Pune.”
That “something concrete” eventually arrived in the form of Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin (2003 – 2006), the show that would turn Singh into one of Indian television’s most recognisable faces. But even then, the role was unusual: the protagonist’s appearance was deliberately designed to reject conventional beauty standards. “When I got to know about the show, what really excited me was that it had worked in 180 countries before,” she recalls. “It was an adaptation of a Spanish show. For me, that was huge.”
What it wasn’t — at least for Singh — was a crisis of vanity. “I just jumped in. I wasn’t thinking about how I was going to look,” she says. “I was in my 20s thinking, ʻwow, this is a big breakʼ.” The impact of the show only became clear later.
“Once it launched, I realised she had become everybody’s girl next door,” Singh says. “It wasn’t about looks or vanity. It was about courage, hard work and skill. Jassi never tried to fit in — and that stayed with me.”
Rules of Her Own
If there is a through-line in Singh’s career, it’s this ardent refusal to conform to what the industry might expect from her. After becoming a television star, she drifted into films, then streaming, often choosing roles that complicated the idea of what a leading woman is supposed to be. “I never really thought about whether I’m the protagonist or a supporting character,” she says. “I know one thing for sure — I’m the protagonist of my life.”
What she looks for instead is texture. “Depth, nuance, resilience. Ambitious women. Women who have agency,” she says. Adding that streaming platforms gave her the freedom to explore those possibilities, she says, “OTT gave me wings as an actor — to experiment, to show my skills, to break stereotypes.”
There is also a certain mischievous delight in how the industry continues to reinvent her. “Life comes up with these funny surprises,” she says, referring to Aamir Khan. “My first film was 3 Idiots. Then I played Laal’s mother in Laal Singh Chaddha. And in Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos, he [Aamir] played my father. Just imagine how life comes full circle,” she says beaming with delight. Singh’s admiration for Khan is unambiguous, but her own creative compass has been shaped by a wide constellation of actors.
“I really look up to Tabu, Kareena [Kapoor Khan], Shefali Shah, Tilottama Shome,” she says. “I love their journeys. They keep reinventing themselves.”
Mother Dear
Reinvention, in fact, is the word that seems to follow Singh everywhere right now. In the past few years, she has appeared in a steady stream of films and shows, often playing women who refuse to fit neatly into the roles traditionally assigned to them — especially mothers.
“The mothers I’ve played on screen aren’t the stereotypical ones crying for their sons and praying to all the gods,” she says with a grin. “Some are heroic, some resilient, some completely different.”
This leads, inevitably, to the question of desirability — a theme that recurs in conversations about Singh’s career. For an actor who has played a mother on screen with striking frequency, she has managed to retain an aura of charisma that feels distinctly her own. Does she see herself as desirable?
“Yes,” she says without hesitation. “I think the kind of woman I’m becoming with my choices on screen and off screen just makes me desirable,” she says. “I come across as strong, independent, fierce, assertive, and I think that makes a woman pretty attractive and desirable,” Singh adds.
She does not seem burdened by the need to control how she is perceived and that attitude extends to fame itself. “Fame is a byproduct,” she says. “If something you do resonates with people, fame will follow.”
Staying Flexible
Singh’s detachment from the rituals of stardom is almost ascetic. She practises yoga, travels when she isn’t working, and approaches sets with a practicality that borders on rebellion.
“I’ve never insisted on having my own make-up team,” she says. “I don’t carry a whole entourage. The production will provide the best people for the project, so why should I worry about it?”
The philosophy is simple: show up, do the work, go home.
Complacency, she says, is the only thing she truly fears. “Aspiring actors come up to me and ask how I did it,” she says. “Honestly, I don’t know. I just didn’t want to stay in one place.”
One of the lessons that has stayed with her the longest came early in her career, when the late Ravi Baswani directed a few episodes of Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin. “I had a very long monologue one day and I had rehearsed it again and again,” she says. “I thought I was being very prepared.”
Baswani stopped her. “He said, ‘Never over-rehearse. Remember your lines but stay flexible.’” The reasoning, Singh says, changed the way she approached acting.
“He told me, if you rehearse too much, your body memorises the rhythm. Then when the director asks you to change something, you can’t adapt because you’re stuck in the pattern you practised. That stayed with me.
Full Circle
Singh has also been paying attention to how storytelling itself is evolving. Short-form storytelling — including the explosion of micro-dramas — fascinates her.
“It’s very interesting,” she says. “People want stories in every format now — long, short, everything in between.” For an actor who has navigated television, cinema and streaming, the shift feels natural rather than disruptive. “You just have to adapt,” she says. “Every era brings something new.”
As the afternoon is slipping into a sticky Mumbai evening. Singh is back on her feet again — checking on her parents, asking a table if they’ve eaten, making sure no one is waiting too long for their food. It’s a small thing, but in a city where celebrity often arrives wrapped in layers of choreography, the simplicity is almost disarming.
Perhaps that is the real source of her desirability. Not the characters she plays. Not the fame she carries. But the refusal to let either become the most interesting thing about her.