Who is Mem Bou Carol? Here's your answer

If you haven't been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you must have, by all probabili ties, come across Carol aka mem bou.
Yeah, that make-believe foreigner, sporting a blond wig and inexplicable blue lenses, giving every wannabe Bengali major accent goals. The female lead of a Bengali GEC's upcoming soap, Mem Bou, is what's keeping Bengalis glued to their computer screens these days. Only two teasers and Carol has shattered all our views of Indian televi sion. Oh Mihir Virani coming back from the dead, oh Simar turning into a fly , oh dear Daya kicking doors... behold... your true match, mem bou Carol is here.

Introducing, actress Vinita Chatterjee.

An accent, that can give Mallika Sherawat a run for her money and subtitle writers a splitting headache, has turned mem bou into more of a meme bou online. And we've proof to convince you all.

The teasers of the upcoming soap have left Facebook in such a frenzy that even people outside the Bengali community are curious about this `mem bou' that's got their Bengali friends obsessed! There even have been spoof videos, featuring a lot of `dope sh*t' accent. When we got in touch with her, Vinita was unwilling to divulge any detail about her character. “I am under contract and cannot reveal anything about this. But what I can tell you is that it is a very challenging character and there is a reason why she speaks in that strange half-baked accent,“ she told us from Europe, where she, along with Sourav Chakraborty , is shooting.

Our sources tell us that it was after many rounds of auditions that Vinita was roped in. And then she evidently had to go through a lot of makeovers.“Vinita is aware of the memes and reactions online. She even found some of them genuinely funny . She thinks that if something is generating so much buzz, then there must be something to it,“ said the source, on conditions of anonymity .

But does she not think that the character is a little OTT? What must have been her impetus to take up such a character, we wondered. “Oh yes, she absolutely gets it. It's a dumb character, and she is aware that it might look ridiculous in the teasers.But until you give people something new, they will keep devouring the same old sh*t. A Bengali serial is being shot in Europe. Unless there's meat to the plot, that doesn't happen every day . What about when normal people turn into goddesses in Hindi serials? Isn't that beyond reasons?
Then what's the problem with Carol?
She is just a character, and Vinita approaches it as just that -just another character,“ added the source.

So, as it turns out, mem bou is not Monali Thakur as a lot of people, including employees of the channel, thought her to be! And let us save you a tonne of trouble by telling you that she has gone off social media to keep the curiosity alive, and trying to stalk and troll her online will be futile.

Vinita Chatterjee

An actress by choice, she has anchored a few shows on national as well as regional television. She was also seen in a small character in Ek Hazaaron Me Meri Behna Hai, starring Kushal Tandon, where she played a Panjabi girl with a strong Sikh accent. She has done a lot of live shows and promotional events. She was also a part of Ishan Trivedi’s film Sunn Ladki, which was never released.

PS: If you still haven't figured it out, she is a pakka Bengali.


— Sutapa Singha