An androgynous mind

Having come from a time when films like Mela were being made and words like sexism and gender equality were confined to social study classes, Twinkle Khanna seems to have gracefully adapted to the time of #Metoo and raging public debates around feminism. Talking about the past, she says, “I don’t look back.”

While ‘Mrs Funnybones’ has emerged out of the actor much later in life, there was no doubt about her being a ‘misfit’, as she calls herself. For someone who had also harboured a dream to be a charted accountant, and had been pushed into Bollywood, she says, “I was always a misfit. I would be knitting on the sets of my films or reading. My grandmom taught me how to knit and ours was a nice hippie household. Someone was always reading, or knitting or playing the guitar,” she tells the audience at the event organised by YFLO Delhi. 

It is this very attitude that has transformed the actor into a much adored author and columnist today. In the capital to promote her recent book, Pyjamas are Forgiving, the actor says, “The pyjamas is a metaphor. It is very nice to be accommodating like pyjamas are, but sometimes as women we let our drawstrings too loose and before we know it we are standing in out underwear.” The book taps on the importance of consent and is in a way a ‘Metoo book’. 

Twinkle says, “Consent has been ambiguous. Even five years ago, a man wouldn’t stop. He would try regardless. That has changed and it has not only affected women. I think men are also looking at their ingrained behaviour and it filtered into this book.”  

On being questioned as to why she doesn’t choose to write about Bollywood or set the book closer home, which she knows so well, Twinkle replies, “Bollywood is boring to me. I don’t write about it in my columns or short stories, It is too familiar.” Having been called a tomboy, she recalls, “I had a mustache, I didn’t use lipstick till I acted in movies. A lot of people told me that I talk like a man, I think like a man and I really thought that there is some man trapped inside my body. I realised soon that my perception didn’t have a gender. As Virginia Woolf says, ‘An androgynous mind is a incandescent mind’.” 

On her views on feminism, Twinkle says, “I think we keep telling women to speak up and be more independent. But you have to tow the line of the hand that writes the cheque. That I think, is the biggest problem. So economic independence is the primary thing for women to be fearless.”

She says she won’t ever write a book about herself, “I won’t do that because it would be all lies. All that you can find about me is in these books, in fiction.”