National awards don’t always impress the entertainment industry. Keerthy Suresh who was so impressive as the iconic actress Savitri of the 1950s, is struggling to find a voice in the fiercely patriarchal Telugu film industry in spite of the National award for her performance in Mahanati.

Bollywood is no better. Keerthy has finally signed a Hindi film. But don’t pop that champagne bottle as yet. It is understood from fairly reliable sources that that Keerthy hardly has any breathing space in Amit Sharma’s Maidaan.

A source very closely associated with the project told me, “It’s an out-and-out Ajay Devgan film. The heroine has very little to do. Most of the story is about Devgan’s character and the other football players. So unless Keerthy is playing football in the film she has nothing to do.”

And that’s exactly the way her career has been going after the magnificent impact she made in Mahanati even in Telugu films. She was recently seen doing a silly cameo with Nagarjuna in Manmadhudu 2.

Right after Mahanati she was seen in a blink-of-an-eye role in Thanaa Serndha Kootam where she played a pretty prop to Suriya. Ditto in other Tamil films Seema Raja, Saamy Square and Sandakozhi 2. In all of these she was a mere prop for the hero.

A pity considering how pretty and pithy she proved herself in Mahanati.

In fact Keerthy had her own misgivings about the future when in a conversation with me after the triumph of Mahanati she confided, “To be honest, the films that I’ve done after Mahanati don’t have much for me to do. But I promise to rectify the imbalance (between the male and female protagonist’s roles) in the film that I sign now.”

Evidently she didn’t keep her word. Why else would she run and sign a big Hindi film just because it stars a big leading man?