It’s Kareena, Kareena everywhere, either holding aloft a Best Actress trophy or flaunting a gorgeous figure hanging on to a nawabi arm. And now, the 27-year-old cover girl of at least three magazines on the news stands, has got her latest wish fulfilled. After two misses with Aamir Khan (they were to co-star in a Vishal Bhardwaj film that never took off and then in Mani Ratnam’s Lajjo where the producer, Bobby Bedi, fell out with Aamir and thus aborted the project), it is third time lucky for Kareena who had the Taare Zameen Par star right on top of her career wish-list.

The project that Kareena Kapoor has bagged with Aamir Khan is no wishy-washy film but the third one to roll out of the formidable Rajkumar Hirani-Vinod Chopra camp. This is Raju’s first foray into the world outside his Munna Bhai circuit. Tentatively titled Idiots, the director acknowledges that the take-off point was Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, but as the script evolved, the film began to look vastly different from the book.

To quote him, “The inspiration did come from Five Point Someone. Chetan sent me the book, I read it, liked it and thought I’d make this as a film. But once we started writing the script, it started finding its own course and now what we’ve taken is only the essence, it’s not the book any more. It’s completely different. But the starting point was Five Point Someone and we will give credit to the book in the film.”

Confirming that Aamir Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Boman Irani of course (a ‘must’ in a Hirani script) are officially aboard his film, Raju hopes to flag off the shooting of Idiots this May. And with this, all the speculation over who’s leading his cast will also die down.

However, here’s a little bit of inside info. The role that Kareena Kapoor has bagged is something that Rajkumar Hirani had earlier offered Kajol!

Nods Hirani, “I met Kajol but that was a long time back when Shah Rukh was to do the film. Kajol had been too occupied at that time and she told me that though she loved the script, she was keen to do only heroine-centric roles. She said that she wanted to do very few films and would choose only those that revolve around the heroine. She was frank enough to say that if I’d gone to her with this script five years ago, she’d have jumped at it. But at this stage of her life she’d only do films that centred around her. Which was completely fair. Anyway, that was a good six months ago.”

Kajol is equally candid about it. Sitting in her swank new bungalow called Shivshakti, smack opposite Dharmendra’s solid white Juhu residence, Kajol tucks into papaya and green tea and says, “Oh yes, Rajkumar Hirani offered me his film and I turned it down. Yeah, it’s all true that I said at this stage I want to do only films that centre around my character. I must have something really strong to do.”

There was a story going around that a miffed Raju had actually dropped the idea of doing this film with Kajol because she had checked the director’s credentials with Shah Rukh Khan (she apparently had no clue who the Munna Bhai director was), and when this reached the film-maker, he decided he wanted to have nothing to do with this actress.

But Kajol, in one of her rare on-record chatty moods, shakes her head and says, “That’s not true at all. The Munna Bhai films are two of my favourite films. I have gone out of my way to get their DVDs and watch them keenly at home. How would I not know who Rajkumar Hirani is? That story wasn’t true at all. Besides, the director had come to me and narrated his first Munna Bhai to me. How would I not remember him after hearing his script for three hours?” Of course, Kajol had turned down the first Munna Bhai as well! “What was there for me to do in it?” she demands. True. Does anybody even remember that the heroine of Munna Bhai MBBS was Gracy Singh?

However, Idiots will be a plum assignment for Kareena. If it’s a role that Kajol would’ve jumped at five-six years ago, it’s definitely what will embellish the much-younger Kareena’s career today.

Hey, psst!

‘Serious’ actor Irrfan Khan’s current reading is a book on tantra and sex. But he wants that kept off the record!

Bharathi S. Pradhan is managing editor of Movie Mag International