This wasn’t the typical Sharon Stone you see posing in glamorous gowns on red carpets across the world. The star decided to ditch the gowns for a much more casual black smock with her hair tied up in a ponytail, and traded the fashion poses for the more awkward touristy ones, as she went about dropping to her haunches and leaning alarmingly far back to capture her friends, with the Taj Mahal in the background, at the best angle possible.

Stone took her sweet time on this visit. Not only was her camera trained on every stone carving, she’d also stop to point the lens at cows, cute Indian babies or other locals. When two Indian women pointed their camera at her, the actress was so fascinated with their sindoor that she started clicking them back. It took them 10 seconds to change their expression from bewilderment to a smile.

This was also not a typical Hollywood celebrity visit to an Indian monument. Missing, for starters, was the sea of paparazzi we’d witnessed when Tom Cruise was here in 2011. There wasn’t even one bodyguard in sight. Instead, Stone chose to sightsee with six of her closest friends, including family friend Tikka Shatrujit Singh.

“I have known her for eight years, she’s a crusader,” Singh said. When asked if he catches up with the star regularly, Singh replied, “It’s because she’s here in India for the first time that I got to spend so much time with her. Wahan pe kahan time milta hai? Bade Hollywood star hain.”

The Taj Mahal didn’t fail to impress the Basic Instinct actress, who was teary-eyed when the guide told her the story behind the monument, and she broke down at Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal’s graves. Stone continued to whisper ‘beautiful’ and ‘magical’, until it was time to leave.
When asked about her lasting impressions of India, Stone chose to be bitingly frank rather than politically correct. Calling India a poem that was both beautiful and sorrowful, she said, “I think that there are things that are required to gracefully bridge the gap between the eccentricity of wealth and the slumber of the poverty. For example, the millions of people that are defecating in the streets, I think it’s not only of service to those people to create a sanitary system, but also for the wealthy people. It’s not logical or intelligent to breathe that in the air. And so, for modern sense of grace, and a higher elevated sense of that same poetry, it seems logical to produce the sanitization system.”

She also spoke about CBI Chief Ranjit Sinha’s recent “rape is inevitable” remark. “When we see public officials making statements that, you know, ‘rape is inevitable’, ‘when it happens to you, enjoy it’ – it lacks the logic that rape is not a gender issue and that lacks compassion, and should be regarded in that way. So, I think it’s a sense of creating maybe one step further in the use of modern communication to achieve that goal,” she said.

“For example, if six out of 10 people aren’t registered to vote, it’s illogical that we don’t use the six billion cellphones or the cellphones that the six billion people on the planet have to register people to vote. Because, if you have everyone voting, then you have a more logical sense of fluidity among the people. And a more modern sense of the inevitable. Because the world, with communication as it exists, is taking an inevitable step towards understanding what’s happening on a global sense,” she elaborated.

source: http://www.articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> Entertainment> Hollywood> Taj Mahal / by Kritika Kapoor, TNN / November 22nd, 2013