‘Ooh I smell curry walking down the hallway’: How Priyanka Chopra was bullied by her schoolmates in US

Actor Priyanka Chopra has revealed for the first time the mean and racist comments she faced, when she was studying at a school in US during her teenage years. In a new podcast, she revealed how a group of ‘mean girls’ accused her of going out with a boy they liked and bullied her with racial slurs. (Also read: Priyanka Chopra moved to Hollywood as she had ‘beef with people’ in Bollywood)

Speaking to Alex Cooper on her podcast Call Her Daddy, Priyanka talked about the bullying. When Alex asked Priyanka what was she specifically bullied about, Priyanka said, “It’s always about a boy.” She said the group of girls thought she spent a weekend with a boy when in reality, she wasn’t even allowed to stay out of home after school.

“These girls just started taking me on. What they started saying instead of ‘b*tch stay away from my man’, they started using racial slurs. Like, ‘I smell curry’, ‘Ooh I smell curry walking down the hallway’, ‘I don’t think she had the time to shower’. Nasty, racial things. Then it became just bullying, pushing against lockers, writing something nasty in the bathroom stalls. Things like mean girl stuff that high school is made of,” Priyanka said.

Priyanka added that she doesn’t know why it happened and only knew that it made her feel ‘less than’. “It made me feel smaller, inferior, made me feel like dim my shine, curl my toes. And I am not that girl. My parents raised me with confidence, having my shine and being okay with it,” she said. Priyanka then decided to ‘pack her bags and go’, just like her dad had taught her all the times they moved due to his army doctor job. “I was like ‘fu** you America, I am going back to India and I’m glad that I did as it kick started my whole career,” she said.

After coming to India, Priyanka participated in Miss India and Miss World pageants. She became Miss World 2000 and even started working in films. In 2015, she moved to America to work in his first TV series, Quantico. She married Nick Jonas in 2018 and was last seen in Prime Video series Citadel and romantic comedy Love Again.