Walking the World
Now the face of JW Marriott's global campaign about presence, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan travels like someone with nothing to prove. London's parks, New York's neighbourhoods, Indian food wherever she goes and holidays built around family have shaped a life spent crossing continents.
By SOH Edit Team
She was eight the first time she left the country. Her father was a marine engineer, and the family flew to Japan, one of those journeys that, in her memory, has dissolved into all the others because there were so many of them. "Travel was a way of life for us," actor Aishwarya Rai Bachchan says, "and often we had our bags packed permanently." It is the kind of detail that explains a person before she has done anything to be explained. Long before the Miss World crown, the L'Oréal contract, the two decades of red carpets at Cannes, and the film shoots that put her atop the Great Wall of China and at Machu Picchu, she was a child who understood a suitcase as a permanent condition of life rather than an occasion.
This June, JW Marriott named her its first global brand ambassador, the human face of a platform it calls Stay in the Moment. The campaign sells stillness: well-being as a sequence of small, deliberate moments, luxury measured less by thread count than by how present a guest feels while enjoying it. There is a version of this collaboration that is pure commerce, and the numbers support it, since Indian outbound travel is now among the fastest-growing luxury segments in the world. Marriott wanted a face the whole of that market would recognise.
The English countryside remains one of the actor's favourite escapes beyond the British capital.
Central Park offers the same invitation to slow down that makes London's parks so memorable.
Family first
But the more interesting thing about the pairing is how little Rai Bachchan has to pretend. "The most meaningful experiences are often the quietest ones," she says of the partnership, "when you are fully aware of where you are and who you are with." What complicates it is that she has been saying versions of it, unprompted and off-brand, for the better part of 30 years.
Ask her what a holiday means, and she does not reach for a destination. "It's family time, always," she says. "Before my daughter was born, we would take a lot of holidays; now Aaradhya is my constant travel companion." The romance of the airport is real for her in a way that is almost comic. " I love flights," she says. "I am psychotic that way." That enthusiasm, however, now exists within the practical realities of family life. Aaradhya's school calendar governs the itineraries now, and Rai Bachchan has turned herself into a kind of amateur logistician, arranging long-haul flights and jet-lag recovery around term dates, unwilling to spend a night away from her daughter when she can help it. One of Indian cinema’s most photographed faces plans her travel the way a slightly harried parent anywhere does, around a nine-year-old's timetable.
The theme that surfaces in what she says is familiarity. She returns to a small set of cities rather than chasing the new one, and she talks about them the way you talk about a friend's house where you know which chair is yours.
Greenwich Village is one of the New York neighbourhoods the actor returns to time and again.
Cities that feel like home
London comes up first and most warmly. She spent a year there after the 1994 pageant, and the affection has the texture of habit rather than glamour. "This city has always felt like my home away from home, beyond Indian shores," she says. "I love walking around, the parks, museums, markets and quaint fairs, exploring the amazing food and the shows at West End theatre." Her advice for the city is almost defiantly unluxurious: walk it, drift through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, take the train into the countryside to see the castles. "I've had many of my professional and personal milestones in London," she says, "so I feel deeply connected to this iconic, global city."
New York carries a private memory, since it is where Abhishek Bachchan proposed to her after the premiere of Guru. Rai Bachchan returns partly for the anonymity a city that size affords. Her recommendations read as a well-worn list passed between friends. "Spend some time in Greenwich Village, SoHo and Central Park," she says. “And, of course, you absolutely must take in a Broadway show. New York City has such a great energy, and a chutzpah similar to Mumbai.”
Food brings her back home: Because the subject of any city eventually turns to dinner, she names a restaurant: Chola, in Midtown East, the Indian kitchen run by the chef Hemant Mathur. "It's a family favourite," she says. It is easy to see why. The woman who has eaten at the best tables on four continents still wants, when she is far from home, a good plate of Indian food. On that, she has never wavered. Years ago, asked about her tastes, she said that she loves only Indian food, that her habits run to the ordinary roti-sabzi-daal-rice. Rai Bachchan’s ideal late dinner at home is small and early, grilled fish with boiled rice, a nod to the Mangalorean coast her family comes from. She has spent a career being called the most beautiful woman in the world, and she has never once performed the asceticism the title seems to demand. “I have always enjoyed my food, and I have never been one for strict diets.”
In Istanbul, Rai Bachchan recommends leaving the hotel to experience the Bosphorus and its waterfront restaurants.
Chola is the family's favourite address for Indian food in New York.
Travelling for work: Rai Bachchan’s filmography has been a passport of its own, and she recounts it with real relish: dancing atop the Great Wall for Jeans, the strange thrill of Machu Picchu while shooting Robot, the "spectacular beauty" of Tunisia and the cold green of Slovakia during The Last Legion. When she reaches a place she does not know, her method is simple and physical. "I'll go out and experience a place. I love walking," Rai Bachchan says. "That way, you feel the pulse of the place, get to connect with the people and the culture." In Istanbul, first visited while filming Dhoom 2, she directs you to eat beside the Bosphorus, to the fish at Rumelihisarı İskele, and away from the hotel restaurant entirely.
Even Dubai, which she likes for reasons of pure convenience, Rai Bachchan frames as familiarity: the proximity, the shopping, the restaurants, an easy weekend that happens to keep her and her family fed and occupied.
The journey that changed everything: The destination Rai Bachchan speaks of with the most feeling is on the African continent. "South Africa has a special place in my heart," she says. "When I went there for the Miss World pageant in 1994, I realised I'd be away from everyone for a month. I had this sense that my life was going to change, and it did." The trip that made her career reads, in her telling, as the trip that separated her from her family for the longest stretch of her young life, which is perhaps why every itinerary since has been engineered to prevent the same thing.
What she brings back: What she brings home is characteristically modest. "Memories, lots of them," says Rai Bachchan. "Friends for a lifetime and, sometimes, clothes and lots of toys for my daughter. Occasionally, I pick up quirky things such as feathers and curios."
In a world chasing adventures and Instagram likes, Rai Bachchan suggests that travel was always cheaper and more ordinary than that: a familiar city walked slowly, a daughter within arm's reach, the same Indian restaurant in a foreign country, a coastal fish dinner eaten early. There is one destination she is still waiting to visit. "I would like to go to the polar regions," she says, “once Aaradhya is a little older.”
Slovakia revealed a quieter side of Europe during the making of The Last Legion.
The Great Wall became one of many extraordinary locations in the actor's film career.
