Living Imran Khan's life for a day

Rhea Banerjee is one lucky girl. She will be the first participant to live the life of her favourite actor Imran Khan on the show Live My Life on UTV Stars, which will air every Sunday at 7pm starting August 21.

Patcy N finds out how Rhea got on the show and what it's like being your most favourite actor for a day.

If there's such a thing as being a fan on first sight, then Rhea Banerjee would undoubtedly qualify. The final year Psychology student from Chennai saw Imran Khan's very first film Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na while on a bus travelling with friends on an outing. And she was hooked.

She started reading about him and tracking all the news about him. "When he joined twitter, I became his crazy fan and I got to know him as a person rather than an actor," says Rhea.

Rhea followed him so devotedly on twitter that her parents scolded her for neglecting her studies. She would get up at 4 am to study and simultaneously keep checking her tweets. Fortunately, she did well in her exams.

When Imran left twitter, she began following him on his fan site. Imran found her to be very intelligent and it was he who suggested to the channel that Rhea be asked onto the show. He left a message for her on his fan site asking her to call the channel, but she saw the message only five days later and was scared she might have missed out.

She spoke to the channel in July and shot for the show in August. It mean coming from Chennai to Mumbai, where she stayed in the presidential suite of the Hotel Renaissance where Imran had stayed during the making of I Hate Love Storys.

The day began by eating the same breakfast as Imran would -- egg whites, toast and muesli. She was thrilled that like her, he likes eggs. Then lunch at Gajalee, Imran's favourite seafood restaurant, where she tucked into tandoor crab, Bombay Duck, dal khichdi and prawn biryani.

There was a script reading session with Punit Malhotra, a mock interview that she thinks went pretty bad, a press conference of Mere Brother Ki Dulhan where she met Katrina Kaif, and a makeover from Imran's personal hairstylist and make-up artist.

So, when did she actually get to meet Imran?

"It seemed like I wouldn't get to meet him at all. I saw him at the press conference of Mere Brother Ki Dulhan, but he avoided me so I thought this was it, I will not get to meet him," she said.

But of course she did. There was a knock on the door at night and there was her favourite star who was going to have dinner with her. Since she had eaten all his favourite foods during the day, Imran called for her favourite foods -- chicken, roti, chawal, and salmon.

They had a long conversation. "I asked him about his school days as I don't know anything about him before he became an actor, about working on a crocodile farm in Ooty (the work involved stealing crocodiles' eggs while someone else distracted it), I came to know that he is an athlete, and about his and Avantika's relationship and how they balance their lives."

Imran confessed that he has the bad habit of forgetting people and Avantika has to warn him. He explained some of the technical aspects of shooting which Rhea found helpful when she was shooting.

Rhea says she loved the life of Imran and all the pampering that she got when she was on the shoot. "First of all I got picked up in his Mercedes, I lived in the presidential suite, he gave me signed CDs of all his movies, he gave me a personal t-shirt which he wore on Koffee With Karan and he gave me a beautiful dress which I wore for the mock interview."

The next day it was life as usual for Rhea, except that her college friends pounced on her and demanded to know all the details. "Suddenly, I became a kind of celebrity! College suddenly seems bland. I got to live the glitz and glam of Imran's life and I will always remember this even when I am old and senile and tell stories to my grandchildren," laughs Rhea.