Managing The Stars: It's All In The Branding

Parull Gossain, 51, is known for Enthiran (2010), Paan Singh Tomar (2012) and Haider (2014). Her job is to create perceptions, to churn out stories from a seemingly insignificant bit and sell them, so a reputation is constructed and sold. It is not easy being a publicist who must manage egos and media, to ensure that there must be a new way of looking at a person. The morality of it all isn’t her concern. The saleability is.

Gossain studied public relations at Xavier Institute of Communications in Mumbai and worked with Channel V and various other channels before starting her own company. “Imagemaking is not for everyone. You must know how to turn around stories,” she says.

It was she who made Emraan Hashmi the guy who was kissing all his heroines. But that was the story she built with some facts and a lot of thought.

Mahesh Bhatt had wanted her to work with Hashmi. She watched his films and saw a kissing scene, then another, and she thought it would be worthwhile to create a male sex symbol. “I realised his stories would not fly in the media. I had to find something and the lip lock was a taboo then,” she says.

Besides, it was time that Bollywood had a male sex symbol. “PR can’t be done by putting out a story. There must be a point that you must make,” she says. In fact, the publicist does not deal in falsehoods. They just make some truths bigger and deflate others. “It is about finding an opportunity,” she adds.

For Gossain, it is also about picking up the right issues. For instance, when Lipstick Under My Burkha was refused certification by the Central Board of Film Certification for its sexual scenes and abusive words, she marked the portions and decided to create a story around that.

“It was about creating an opinion about women,” she says.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Managing the Stars")