Anyone who’s even chanced an encounter with Preity Zinta will tell you about her loquaciousness, but today, at her Bandra home, the actress talks between sneezes and sniffles. “This flu is giving me sleepless nights,” she whines. And yet the perky lass can never let anything spoil her fun for too long; she quickly forgets about her headache and starts to excitedly talk about going to Harvard Business School next month.

“Yes, I’m going to study a short executive course in negotiating and deal making. I thought that since I spend so much time in the US, I might as well use the experience better,” she smiles. “I applied to Harvard and got accepted so I’m quite kicked about going there next month.”

So does this keen interest in business mean that we won’t be seeing her much on the big screen? “Not at all,” she says, “I want to make sure that I can balance acting and business. In fact, I’m currently buried under a pile of scripts and am reading each one to make sure that I don’t miss out on anything good. I want to do a role that I’ve never done before.”

That must be tough for an actress who’s played nearly everything there is to offer for a heroine. She’s played the arrogant rich girl in Armaan, the child-woman in Koi Mil Gaya, the abused housewife in Heaven on Earth, a prostitute in Chori Chori Chupke Chupke, a cop in Sangharsh, a journalist in Lakshya, a Punjabi widow in Heroes—the list goes on. “I’ve always wanted to play a poor girl in a village. I’m always wondering why no one has ever offered me such a role, even though I still get offers to play teenyboppers,” she says. “When I die, I want people to look at my films and say that there is no hole in the graph. I don’t care what critics say or how well the film does. I just want the experience of playing that character to be enriching, like it was for Heroes, Heaven on Earth and King Lear.”

She’s also busy with the television show Behind the Seams, which she is hosting and producing as well. She’s all excited about getting into the television circuit but Zinta admits that she hasn’t watched television for the past two months. “TV soaps have these close ups of people in dark black kohl and it really scares me,” she laughs. “Reality shows are also all staged, there’s nothing real in them. So what’s there to watch?”