Bollywood Goes Metro-Sexual With A Vengeance

Ranveer Singh, known for his  outlandish fashion sense, has worn a skirt more than once  in public.

Now it’s  the more conservative dresser Varun Dhawan’s turn to  don a  skirt for a magazine cover.

2020 is  going to be the  year when Bollywood heroes are  likely to explore the female  side of their personality. Akshay Kumar plays a transgender  in his Diwali bombshell Laaxmi Bomb while Rajkummar Rao  gets  into  a  cross-dressing  act   in   Anurag Basu’s Ludo . Far from being ridiculed Rao is  being compared  to Alia Bhatt on Twitter.

20-year old Bengali  actor Ridhi  Sen who won a National award  in 2018  for  playing a transgender in the Bengali  film Nagarkirtan feels it’s time  actors explored   both the masculine and  feminine side to their  personality,  “An  actor should not be inhibited  by the gender of his character. Rather he  should welcome the opportunity to go into areas that are unknown  to him.”

 Riddhi says he  played the transgender  in  Nagarkirtan as  a woman rather than  an unfinished woman. “I studied the mannerisms and  graces   of  my mother , who is my greatest influence, and my girlfriend.I imbibed their  personality  and  made sure I didn’t  mimic them.I never thought of  the impact that the  character would make or that I’d win a National award  for it. One doesn’t do a  role  after assessing  its influence. One does it because it’s there waiting to be brought alive.”

There was a  family friend,  the late and much missed filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh  who also went through a struggle  similar  to  the character in Nagarkirtan. Riddhi says Ritu was  an influence. “Our family was  very close to him. I did observe  him. But like I said, I played my character as a woman, not as  man struggling to be  a woman. The  film and  the character are very relevant because of what  is happening in the character,” says Ridhi referring to the Article 377.