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Best known for her bold appearance in ‘Grand Masti’, Kainaat Arora entered the film world with high hopes and a famous connection; she’s the cousin of the late Divya Bharti
News18
The glitz and glamour of Bollywood often conceal the difficult roads many actors travel before, during, and after their time in the spotlight. For actress Kainaat Arora, that path has been marked by comparisons, missed opportunities, and moments of brutal honesty, even from some of the industry’s biggest stars.
Best known for her bold appearance in Grand Masti, Kainaat entered the film world with high hopes and a famous connection; she’s the cousin of the late Divya Bharti, the tragic superstar whose meteoric rise and sudden death in the early 1990s still cast a long shadow over Hindi cinema.
But for Kainaat, that relationship turned into a complicated legacy. “If Divya wasn’t my cousin, maybe I would have had a better career,” she told IANS in a recent interview, adding, “Still, I am her biggest fan.”
She debuted with Akshay Kumar in Khatta Meetha and later worked in multiple Punjabi and South Indian films, yet success remained elusive. Despite sharing screens with major stars and playing glamorous roles, her career never quite gained the traction she’d hoped for.
Her struggle, she says, was visible to everyone including her co-stars Ajith Kumar and Sanjay Dutt who advised her to leave the film industry. Recalling her time working with Ajith Kumar in Mankatha, she said that Ajith had once bluntly told her to leave the industry. “Ajith told me, ‘Kainaat, you are too simple. You need to be fully prepared because the journey is not easy’,” she told IANS. Sanjay Dutt, according to her, had given her similar advice during the early phase of her career.
Even her own parents were never fully on board with her decision to pursue films. “I didn’t plan to come into this field,” she admitted, adding that things just happened, and she went along with the flow.
Still, not everyone in the industry tried to talk her out of it. Talking about Akshay Kumar, who she credits for pushing her to do better, Kainaat said that he was “motivating, funny, and extremely supportive on set”. The actress also addmitted to learning a lot from her other co-stars like Vivek Oberoi, Ritesh Deshmukh, Mohanlal, and Gippy Grewal.
“Even though I’m Punjabi, Gippy helped me with diction when we were shooting in the US. I’ve learned so much silently just by observing these amazing actors. Ritesh, for example, is incredibly spontaneous; his one-liners were often improvised, and I was just absorbing everything like a student,” she said.
That journey, from a small town in Uttar Pradesh to the towering sets of Mumbai and beyond, hasn’t been smooth, but it has been hers. Starting with modeling in Delhi, Kainaat slowly found her way into cinema, acting in films across languages and regions.
“It’s not easy to move from a small town to a big city and find your place. I came to Delhi to study and pursued a merchandising course from NIFT. One day, while crossing the road, I got a modelling offer. I never thought I’d be doing modeling while still studying. I lived in a PG hostel, and money was tight. My father was facing business issues, and we had loans,” she said.
Her story is far from over. But whether it’s being compared to Divya Bharti or being told to pack her bags, Kainaat Arora’s journey reminds us how unpredictable and demanding the film world truly is, and how some actors continue walking the road, even when everyone says they shouldn’t.
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