To be a hottie at 49 is not short of a miracle. Raveen Tandon looks incredibly alluring .She loves to hear that. She attributes her wow looks to nothing more than healthy lifestyle. “I don’t sit and count how old I am.Eat well, sleep the right hours and do not obsess over looking good…Nature will take care of you, if you take care of yourself. Look at Hemaji. She glows even at her age,’” says Raveena who never stopped looking stunning even after marriage and motherhood.She too glow when she reaches Hemaji’s age.

A true-blue emotional, extroverted possessive and impulsive Scorpio, Raveena found love and happiness with the well-known Mumbai distributor Anil Thadani.Raveena is the one that got away among the actresses of her generations. Manisha Koirala, Tabu, Karisma Kapoor are either looking for love or have given up on it.

When Raveena laughs you can hear her voice on the other end of town. Her extreme pleasure in the humorous side of life(hers and others) is equalled by her emotional insecurity – a typical Scorpio trait, and one that cost her plenty in terms of emotional discontent.

But Raveena is never one to sit and weep. A more spirited girl would be hard to find in the film industry. Funk and spunk aren’t fashion statements for her. Raveena thrives on these qualities. Her insecurities as an individual and an artiste have never bogged her down.

But they made her “one of the guys”. Too emotional to be anyone’s fool, Raveena simply turned her co-stars into buddies rather than lovers. Sanjay Dutt, Govinda, Jackie Shroff, Suniel Shetty…..barring one actor , all of the big guns of Bollywood are the bosom buddies of their favourite ‘Ravs’.

This gives her a kind of bird’s eye view of who’s doing what to whom. Some of my most entertaining gossip sessions with Raveena have been about her male co-stars’ hijinks.

I remember after the premiere of Kamal Haasan’s Abhay at a multiplex, all of us proceeded for dinner. No one was eating much. There was loud conversation across the table, Raveena being the loudest of them all. I was speaking with Ehsaan of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy fame, when suddenly in the middle of the meal she got a call.

“I’ll be right back,” Raveena announced to me in a whisper, and she left. She returned a good half an hour later, looking extremely happy with life.

“That was my buddy John Abraham. He took me for a spin on his new mo’bike,” she leaned over and whispered happily.

That’s not the only time a man has taken her for a ride. There have been times when Raveena has touched rock-bottom emotionally and professionally. But she has bounced right back, giving tit for tat. Never as career-oriented as her colleague Karisma Kapoor , Raveena always wanted to be a wife and a mother, more than anything else.

“Being an object of desire and all that jazz is all very fine. But I’ve seen how happy my mother was with my father. I want that for myself,” she once confided in me.

Today she has got what she most wanted.