TC Article:Ekta Kaul's 'disappearing act'.

Ekta Kaul, the protagonist of Zee TV's Rab Se Sohna Isshq (Jay Productions) has been plagued by ill health for quite some time now. However, the interesting thing to be noted here is that the actress, in spite of her never-ending health issues has apparently gone ahead and signed on the dotted lines to be a participant in Colors' upcoming show Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa Season 6.

Does this surprise you as a reader? Well, there is quite a lot that will take you by surprise as you read on.

Ekta who was recently in the news for her apparent breakup with boy friend and co-actor Kanan Malhotra all of a sudden did not report on the sets yesterday morning (25 April 2013). Her call time was supposed to be 7am, and even when all the other actors and the entire unit had assembled to shoot a very important sequence post the six years leap in the show, the lady went missing. Her mobile phone was switched off, and the people in the production house kept calling her frantically. They even made visits to her house, but nobody opened the door. When they called Kanan (Malhotra) to know of her whereabouts, he was completely clueless. The unit members got desperate and even called Ekta's parents and Kanan's parents, but to no avail.

So did she ever turn up for shoot? Are you wondering what happened to her?

Well, at around 12 in the noon, her mother finally received one such call that the unit members made, and said that her daughter was unwell and will not be coming to shoot. Aah, to get such an answer, that too after nearly five hours of wait should have been irritating to the core.

However, the production team was hard-pressed for time as they had no bank whatsoever, and needed her to complete the shoot for the same day's telecast. Tough going, isn't it? So they somehow managed to get the girl on the set to shoot. Ekta who now has a sling in her hand for some reason, delivered her lines in such a horrible manner that the unit members had to opt for nearly 25-30 retakes. This again irked quite a lot of people. But at the end of the day, the production team somehow compromised for quality as they had no time in hand to deliver their episode to the channel. Though the mission was accomplished to send the episode on time, this 'disappearing act' of Ekta did create a lot of chaos on the sets.

We also hear that the production house was so much irked about the happening that they instantly dropped a mail to the channel that they had taken enough from the girl, and wanted a replacement as soon as possible.
Well, this is the incident that happened yesterday. With so much of information, we tried to contact our sources to know their perspective on things.

A reliable source from the set told us that, "We emphasize with Ekta as she has not been keeping well. At the same time, being the lead actor of the show, she holds a big responsibility on her shoulders to deliver on time. Agreed, that she was not well as she recently went through a shoulder injury after which her hand was in sling. But she always has this communication problem and even when she suffered the shoulder injury and the doctor advised her to have a sling, she did not let the team know of it.They were taken by surprise when she came to the set with a sling, and very categorically told them that she will have to have the sling for 15 days."

The source continued,"The result was that the creative team had to immediately change the script in order to incorporate Ekta along with her sling in the story line. And even on the day when she did not report on sets at the given call time, the bare minimum that every channel and maker will want from their actors is to communicate at the right time. A mere text message saying that she is too ill to report on sets could have made the difference. Instead, the girl decided to take it easy by not intimating anything, till the time her mother got the great intuition of picking up the call from the unit member. This only shows the highest level of unprofessionalism that Ekta has towards her work."

The channel source told us that, "Ekta has an injury on her shoulder and has been shooting with a sling. Shoot is cut to cut but at this point, no one is talking of dropping her."

We tried to call Ekta Kaul and even sent her a text message, but she did not respond to our text.

We dropped a text message to Producer Kinnari Mehta to know more about the unprofessional behaviour of Ekta, but did not get any revert till the time we filed our story.

Recollecting all the reports that have come out in the media about Ekta's health problems, we get to believe that the girl suffers from a sever migraine problem, cervical spondilitis problem and has a very sensitive stomach that gets bad every now and then. And now to add to these, is the recent shoulder problem that Ekta has suffered.

A point to ponder over here, is that when the girl is suffering from so many health issues, and finds it tough to report on the sets of her ongoing fiction show, wonder how will she be able to cope up with the rigorous schedule of Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa?

Or can we say that the unit of Rab Se Sohna Isshq is all set to have more problems? And what about the new set of problems that Colors and BBC will have to face by getting Ekta on board?

Let us simply wait and watch!!!

Later, Ekta got in touch with us and said, "I met with an accident and my shoulder was badly hurt. I was in the hospital that night so I couldn't inform them because I was on painkillers and hospitalised. Though I was only 2 hours late but I still shot with my team in severe pain and terrible heat."