Actor, director and producer Pooja Bhatt is known for a lot of things but the one thing she is not known for is hiding her flaws or pretending that she’s perfect. In an industry that lives on images built by managers and agencies, Bhatt is unique, real and couldn’t care less what you think about her. For Women’s Day, the actor speaks exclusively to us about why she is the way she is, opening up about her drinking problem and marriage.
On being raised differently:
I think that there would be so much less pain in the world if we kind of levelled with each other instead of talking down to each other. I think that I always had the privilege of parents who treated me as an equal. In fact, if you look at my character from Bombay Begums is someone who never had that life and she had to suppress so many secrets. Somebody had asked me what drew me to this role was the fact that she was a lady boss and in charge of the workplace? I said, yes, that world was fascinating but I think my greatest privilege is to be cast as someone playing my age.
On opening up about her drinking problem:
We try to cover up many things and – look at my life – four years ago when I decided to quit drinking, I decided to be open about it. I felt like I was somebody who began her career with a film like Daddy which was about a young girl getting her father who’s an alcoholic to stop drinking. And there was I dealing with the same problem. I reached to people out there to let them know that, you know, it’s something that could happen to anybody and women especially need to be a little bit more open about that. And I was so overwhelmed by the response that I got from random strangers.
On marriage and fairytales:
No matter what we women achieve in the world out there, a lot of us come home and our achievements are reduced to ‘haan, theek hai na, tumne Nobel Prize bhi jeet liya magar abhi khaane ka kya hai?’ Are you a mother? Are you not? Are you married? Are you not? I’ve been asked by so many people ki why aren’t you getting married again and I tell them that I’ve grown up from thinking ‘and they lived happily ever after’ to my rhetoric changing to ‘and she lived happily ever after’. I’ve been there, done that, tried it and recommend it to anyone who wishes to but I’ve been there and my life is not incomplete because I choose to life the way I do.