Bollywood  Roundtable  With  Vidya,Anushka, Sonam, Radhika, Alia Proves Actresses Can Be Brutally Frank…And Friends

Sonam Kapoor doesn’t have fond memories of Akshay Kumar Raveena Tandon. On CNN-IBN’s Bollywood Roundtable, Sonam spoke in excruciating vividness of how she was molested at age 14 when she had gone to watch an Akshay-Raveena film with friends.

Sonam’s colleagues listened in rapt stunned attention. So did we. It is painful to hear a celebrity child who, in her own hands, was born with a golden spoon in her mouth, being subjected to the same boorish groping and manhandling that girls from ordinary homes go through every day.

Welcome to the real world.

Sonam didn’t mince words as she spoke of clammy male hands grasping her breasts from behind at a time when she didn’t have breasts.

Did we all wince? We sure did. Serves us right. By fostering a festering regressive social order  we’ve brought this shame and embarrassment on  us.

Sonam made another enormously subliminal   self-revelation when she said all the elaborate dressing-up she did was an ‘armour’ to protect herself from the outside world. She said she admired an actress like RadhikaApte who could be so uninhibited about her body.

Rajeev Masand’s Bollywood  Roundtable 2016 brought to us the 5 actresses who made the most difference to the year.

The two indisputable facts which emerged from the compelling confab , besides the obvious fact that these are 5 of the most beautiful contemporary actresses  we have, is that today’s actresses can be friends and the days of catfights among actresses is over .The quintet of divas spoke frankly and fearlessly about body-shaming, nudity, child abuse, molestation, on-screen kissing(this section of their gupshup was hilarious), boyfriends and …well, just friend-friends.

What can we say? Except,  more power to these empowered women who have changed the way we look at the Hindi film heroine even as the roles that they play have changed the way they look at life.Alia Bhatt spoke about how violated she felt playing the raped drugged woman who had nothing, absolutely nothing to lose, in Udta Punjab. Sonam spoke of  how compassionate and giving she became after playing Neera Bhanot in Neerja. Vidya Balan revealed her growing awareness of child abuse apropos Kahaani 2….

Erudite, articulate, informed and inquisitive, these ladies are a far cry from the ‘Ask Mummy’ stereotype of the clueless divas who existed once upon a time when child abuse was something that existed only in books and rape was a calamity that happened to the heroine’s sister just before she jumped off the cliff.