Kriti Sanon: The Turning Point

With Netflix’s Mimi (2021), Kriti Sanon has marked a turning point in her film career, which began in 2014. An engineering graduate, Kriti is an instinctive actor but Mimi enabled her to dig deeper into herself and find the resources to play a mother in all its pain and glory. From putting on 15 kg for the role to carrying a 5 kg prosthetic belly to studying YouTube videos of women giving birth, Kriti worked hard on the character of a young woman in Rajasthan who gives up her dream of being in Bollywood to become a mother—after first accepting an offer of surrogacy from an unfortunately caricatured American couple because she needed the money to start her movie career. It’s not the most empowering message, but it does keep the character’s agency alive as she consciously chooses to be a mother. It has encouraged Kriti to take risks with her career and to fly higher. There is a scene in the movie where she breaks down after putting powder on her face, a moment that encapsulates everything she had wanted. “I just couldn’t stop crying,” she says, “the tears just went on and on. I’ve always been able to switch on and switch off.” That moment felt different, says Kriti. The effort and the authenticity clearly worked offscreen as well.

Salt of the Earth

“I was shooting in Kargil with a real-life jawan behind me and when I stood up suddenly, there was a bit of mud on my uniform. The jawan behind me said, doesn’t matter, apni to mitti hai (it’s our soil),” says actor Sidharth Malhotra, recalling what went into making Amazon Prime’s Shershaah, the biopic of Captain Vikram Batra, who lost his life in the 1999 Kargil War. Sidharth, who began his acting career in Mumbai cinema in 2012 with Student of the Year, underwent a gruelling 45-day boot camp in Mumbai for the movie, before actually shooting in Kargil at 12,000 feet in tough terrain for another 45 days, living and working under the protection of the Indian Army. Some of the soldiers in the film are actually on the front and Sidharth felt a huge sense of responsibility to Batra’s memory, his family and the country, to represent him in the most authentic way possible. Sidharth’s grandfather fought in the 1962 war in artillery and was injured. So, he has some sense of the sacrifice soldiers and their families make for the nation, which may explain why he has been piloting this project through Bollywood’s labyrinth for the past five years. Living with the soldiers, shooting with them, eating with them, and observing their life so closely—these are experiences Sidharth will treasure all his life, he says. And his question to every 24-year-old is this: what are you doing with your life at 24? At 24, Captain Batra had laid down his life for the nation.

The Obesity Challenge

Sometimes, childhood struggles never leave us. For Arjun Kapoor, his weight has been his biggest challenge since adolescence. And he has seized the moment to spark a conversation about it in India. Society, he says, needs to be empathetic about what a child might be going through to put on so much weight, and second, the impact obesity itself can have on the child’s body, image and psychology. He says, “You don’t realise that you could be crumbling from inside while putting on a brave face. It has happened to me. It happens to a lot of people. I’m happy that I’m a work in progress. I think we all are.” Arjun has been subjected to considerable trolling because of his fluctuating weight and clearly doesn’t want others to suffer what he did. “We should aim to build a society where people love and care for each other and try and understand what the other might be coping with,” he says. If only.

Did You Know?

41 Pali Hill was once the most famous address in Mumbai’s cultural landscape. A three-storeyed bungalow, it was owned by an Anglo-Indian couple, the Vernon Corkes, who lived on the top floor. Uma and Chetan Anand, and Chetan’s two brothers, Dev and Vijay (Goldie) lived on the second, and Zohra and Kameshwar Segal, with their daughter Kiran, lived on the ground floor. The actor Balraj Sahni and his wife Damayanti were already at number 41, sharing one of the floors, and before long, were joined by Balraj’s younger brother Bhisham and his wife Sheela, who were in Bombay for their honeymoon. And then there were those who were not living in the house but spent so much time in it that they might as well have moved in, writes Ritu Menon in her new biography of the great actor-dancer Zohra Segal. There is a biography of a house waiting to be written

Arjun KapoorBollywoodcinemaKriti SanonSidharth Malhotra