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Caught Simran yet? Kangana Ranaut pulls off a wonderfully flawed protagonist - yes, women are allowed to be real human beings too.
Caught Simran yet? Kangana Ranaut pulls off a wonderfully flawed protagonist – yes, women are allowed to be real human beings too.
Dear Simran, Praful and Kangana*,
Thank you so much, for inviting us into those past few months of your life in Atlanta. We had a fabulous time.
Yes, we know. You are on the wrong side of everything ‘important’, isn’t it.
Marriageable age, limits of law and ‘real character flaws’.
Well, we want you to know, that we loved you, just the same. We adored you for those very quirky ways.
Your zest for life and your fighting spirit was so refreshing and unbelievable to see in a Bollywood heroine that even in the handful of frames in which you were not there onscreen, we missed you, sorely.
We haven’t seen a ‘filmy heroine’ do the things you did, you see. A heroine who shed her vain ideology of ‘femininity’ to ‘be human’ first and then be so hopelessly realistic that we squirm in our seats with uneasy recognition of similar snippets from our own damned lives.
We have all lived with one or more of those ‘diseases’ at some point of our lives, haven’t we? ‘Publicly’ broken relationships, merciless societal reminders, utter lack of privacy in Indian families, the trauma of living with a frustrated chauvinistic father, pathetic pervert bosses at work and of course, moments of ourselves falling prey to our own emotional vulnerabilities.
In you, we see us, some as a whole, some in pieces.
Because like you, aren’t we all, broken in some way or the other?
Fighting a battle so hard, to assemble our shattered pieces and present to the world a beautiful kaleidoscope instead?
So when a sister trades your faith, you stumble to gamble and we nod in agreement. When a father torments your very existence, you become desperate, for money and freedom and cross the ‘line of control’. We empathize, fully.
Life is indeed, a struggle, even abroad.
And a woman’s life is not very different, even abroad.
So you fight as a person, clawing out strength from the vast reservoir of good intentions at your heart. Because feminine power is not about smoking a cigarette without a cough or drinking a beer with élan. It comes from a feeling of wholeness within. The feeling of completeness, which the only ‘man’ in your life, Sameer rightly acknowledges and envies in you.
So thank you again, for showing us a slice of your realistic life of depressing troubles in which you powerfully choose, to live happily after.
Hope to see you again
(probably at the next National Awards),
We
P.S: Curious to see more of you in a sequel!
*Kangana plays Praful a.k.a Simran in the movie.
Recently contributed to an international collaborative project of short stories called “She Celebrates”. Follow her work at Instagram- @kreative_kamalika read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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