She was known for her full-on charm in Rendezvous with Simi Garewal, a celebrity chat show drenched in pastel-hued gentility that ran for nine long years. But today, the queen of charm seems to have suddenly been cast in a whole new mould — that of a polarising, controversial figure who forgot to be politically correct.

In the weeks since she made her by now famous comments about how India ought to carpet bomb Pakistan’s terror camps to avenge the assault on Mumbai, Garewal has been accused of a multitude of sins. She has been flayed for unthinking jingoism and reviled for not knowing the difference between an Islamic flag and a Pakistani one — a “mistake” for which she apologised later. Indeed, from movie stars to newspaper columnists — nearly everyone who is anyone has felt obliged to react to her remarks and suggest that she was naïve at best and pernicious at worst.

Garewal herself is baffled by the brouhaha over her comments. “It seems as if the right to speech is not applicable to celebrities,” she says with an air of resignation. “If the common man voices his opinion, as millions have, it’s all right. But if you are a celebrity, your every word is dissected and criticised. Instead of picking on me, I do wish people would use that energy to make our politicians a little more accountable.”

We rendezvous at Garewal’s well-appointed apartment in Mumbai’s posh Malabar Hill area. I had half expected to find her in one of her trademark white designer ensembles. But she is dressed casually — in a round-necked tee and trousers — all in pristine white, of course. Tall, trim and elegant, the 60s siren with tip-tilted eyes and a gorgeous figure still looks surprisingly youthful and fit. But she declines to tell me how old she is. “I’m as old as I look,” she parries, laughing.

Her living room is tastefully decorated with a variety of objets d’art and a large number of Buddha statues in attitudes of meditation and repose. A big portrait of a younger, more luminous, Garewal hangs on one wall. On another wall, there are several lithographs and engravings — “my sister collects them,” she tells me. Her two dogs, a Pomeranian and a Maltese called Diva and Aria, bark excitedly at the sight of a stranger. I make friends with them, especially with the exuberant little Aria. Peace reigns, and Garewal — polished, articulate, and yes, unfailingly charming — returns to the subject that consumes her right now.

“What I said emanated from a deep sense of frustration. Every Indian life is precious and none should be lost because of the incompetence of our government,” she says, her voice ringing with conviction.

It’s a little hard to reconcile this outspoken, let’s-hold-the-pols-accountable kind of person with her image in the Rendezvous show, where she radiated serenity, smiled softly, and rarely confronted her celebrity guests with tough questions. “Oh, but I did ask tough questions,” she retorts. “I did it with charm. You don’t have to get hostile to ask tough questions. But with politicians it’s different. They are public servants and we have the right to demand that they ensure our safety and security.”

Rendezvous may have been criticised for being treacly, but it was certainly the first celebrity chat show of its kind on Indian television. Launched in 1997, it became hugely popular and went on to spawn a host of others. “In fact, Karan (Johar) always tells me that ‘you were the pioneer’,” she smiles.

But Garewal’s apotheosis as talk show diva happened much later. In the beginning she had only wanted to be an actress. Brought up in England — her father, an ex-army man, shifted the family to Richmond, near London, when she was five — the young Simi realised that as a “coloured” person she wouldn’t get too many roles in the West. So she came back to India in 1962 to try and make it in the Hindi film industry.

But even here she was a bit of an outsider. Her sophisticated, westernised demeanour sat ill with the naach-gaana stock-in-trade of Bombay films. “It was extremely hard for me,” she says. “I had to change myself completely.”

There was also some amount of prejudice against her because of her westernised ways. “But then I face that even now,” she says. “Even today, some people are immediately prejudiced against you if you speak well or are groomed well. They say ‘oh, elitist hai, society type hai’. But I am not at all a society type.” she exclaims. “It’s almost as though if I go with a jhola and a crumpled kurta and pyjama whatever I’d say would be okay!”

Her upper crust image notwithstanding, throughout the 60s Garewal did do a string of Hindi movies, though none of them too exceptional. Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker (1970) was really her first high profile role, one where she played a school teacher who deftly handles her student’s fervid adolescent crush on her.

Almost simultaneously, Satyajit Ray offered her the role of an adivasi girl in Aranyer Din Ratri (1969). “It was definitely the highlight of my career,” says Garewal, who fondly recollects the experience of shooting on location for the film. “We stayed in a hut. There was no running water, no flush, we had aloo for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But we were all so happy! It was an amazing experience.”

She happened to share an enthusiasm for word games with Ray and she remembers how the director would come over to their hut in the evening to play these games. Later, when she came to Calcutta to shoot for Mrinal Sen’s Padatik (1973), Ray looked her up. “‘I’ve got a new game,’ he said, ‘I am coming over in 40 minutes,’ ” says Garewal, mimicking his gravelly voice, and laughing.

I slip in my own rapid fire question here: Ray or Kapoor?

“They were both brilliant, but very different,” she replies, refusing to choose one over the other. “I’ll give you one difference. Manikda exposed 27,000 feet of film for Aranyer Din Ratri while Raj Kapoor exposed four and a half lakh feet of film for Mera Naam Joker. One was abstemious, the other grand — a whole caravan stretched through the road when Raj Kapoor was shooting.”

It was also Kapoor, she says, who convinced her to do the controversial topless scene in Conrad Rooks’ screen adaptation of Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha. “I was reluctant at first,” says Garewal. “But when Raj Kapoor heard about it, he told me that if I do the role I should give it a 100 per cent.” After all, she was playing a courtesan, he argued, and so it was part of the territory, as it were.

Today she regrets suing the magazine that published her topless photos from the film. “It just gave them a lot of unnecessary prominence,” she says.

By the early 80s, Garewal had left her flagging acting career behind and reinvented herself as a film-maker and television personality. She launched her own production company, wrote and directed a Hindi film, Rukhsat (1983), did a magazine programme for Doordarshan called It’s a Women’s World (1984), and went on to make a critically acclaimed documentary on Raj Kapoor for BBC’s Channel 4. She soon got another commission from Channel 4, this time to do a documentary on Rajiv Gandhi.

She becomes a bit emotional when she talks about the Rajiv Gandhi she knew closely for four-and-a-half years while she was researching her three-part documentary, India’s Rajiv, that was telecast after his assassination in 1991. “He was a decent, good, guileless man. He wasn’t really cut out for politics,” she says. “I remember what he told me after he lost the elections in 1989. ‘How do you feel’, I asked him. ‘Relieved,’ he said. ‘But I feel bad for my party members. They worked so hard!’ ”

Garewal is an engaging raconteur who can surprise you with the wealth of her memories — vignettes of her interesting exchanges with people like Rajiv Gandhi, Ray or Kapoor. But she is not planning her memoirs just yet. Right now she is all set to produce a film for which she has written the screenplay. However, she won’t say much about the film other than the fact that she is likely to star in it.

Briefly married to a Delhi businessman, today, Garewal lives with her elder sister and her two dogs. She counts Bollywood’s younger set among her friends — people like Karan Johar, Farah Khan, Apoorva Lakhia, Tarun Mansukhani (director of Dostana) and others. Doesn’t she hang out with her pals from the olden days?

“Oh, but I never had any pals in Hindi cinema in those days,” she laughs ruefully.

A self-confessed Internet freak — she chats online for hours — Garewal likes to write poetry, and believe it or not, can sing a Rabindra Sangeet with a near perfect accent. “I love Rabindra Shongeet,” she declares and is sporting enough to even sing a few lines of Shedin dujone. She picked up her repertoire of Tagore songs while she was shooting for Aranyer Din Ratri, she says, actually taking lessons in them so she wouldn’t feel left out when other members of the cast like Rabi Ghosh or Soumitra Chatterjee sang them.

As the interview winds down, Garewal shows me a poem she has written — an “ode” to the Taj. It’s not exactly Keats, but it is a touching tribute to the epicentre of Mumbai’s latest encounter with mind-numbing terror.

And probably, it’s also her own private response to all those who doubted the sincerity of her emotion in the bloody, outraged, aftermath of 26/11.