When you meet a celebrity for the first time, there are several questions running through your mind. Among anticipation about their looks, height, proof of plastic surgery, you hardly expect a warm welcome, let alone them saying you look familiar. But that’s where Gul Panag threw us off balance, by not only saying that but also telling us that she saw us walk upstairs through the coffee shop and had in fact registered it. In town to promote her latest movie Turning Thirty, Gul hardly looks the age, even when she candidly admits that she had touched the number during the shoot itself. “It was like going back to college, with people of almost the same ages working together. It started with Purab, who first turned 30 and the others kept following. I have never had so much fun on the sets ever,” she told us.
Speaking about the film, which is produced by Prakash Jha and directed by debutant, Alankrita Shrivastava, it is a small budget film, which tries to show the urban Indian woman just as she is. “I didn’t have to put a lot of effort in the research frankly as the stories were all around me,” she says. Talking about the reservation of Bollywood towards an intelligent, regular woman, without making her an object of desire, she says, “Somehow, there is a large percentage of women like the protagonist whose stories never make it to mainstream cinema. Though I never felt any resistance while making the film, but even before release and in post-production I am beginning to sense it.” Wanting to make cinema that is true to her, Alankrita doesn’t feel that every woman needs to make women-oriented films. “Farah Khan and Zoya Akhtar make the kind of films they do because they are honest to what they feel. I want to do the same,” she states.
Gul, on the other hand, speaks of the film as widely removed from the chick flick category. “With most such characters be it Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City or Bridget Jones, you want to scream at them and tell them to stop doing the obviously foolish things they are doing. But the lead Naina is not like that. She is successful in every possible way, until a series of events turn her life upside down completely,” she says. Touching upon the latest controversy when she ran the marathon in Delhi, she said that while most of the reaction to her molestation comment was positive, there was some negative feedback too. “I wasn’t saying that every guy from Delhi gropes, but then from the state of affairs and the latest alleged rape case of the BPO employee, it becomes clear how safe women are here,” she remarks adding that CM Sheila Dikshit’s remark about women staying at home for the fear of safety was completely appalling. “Don’t I pay taxes and isn’t it the state’s responsibility to protect me? If all women stop paying taxes, then I would happily sit at home and not go out for the fear of being raped,” she says.