Tahira Kashyap Khurrana talked to Brut about why she’s celebrating women’s problems in her debut feature film and why it took six years to make it happen.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00who is in it, five women, the door has closed.
00:04All you need to do is live like a woman and there'll be many, many problems.
00:18Everybody feels that this, let's not make this film because this is a female-oriented film and
00:24oriented I feel is such a contrived word. They are characters, there's stuff happening to them
00:31and they happen to be women. There are a lot of times that I didn't even get an opportunity to
00:36narrate because it was Sharma ji ki beti, okay, interesting name, who is in it, five women,
00:44the door has closed. It has not even gone beyond that.
00:47So, eventually, it took me six years to make this film.
01:00All you need to do is live like a woman and there'll be many, many problems and
01:04obstacles thrown your way and I think that was my biggest observation and experience.
01:10But I chose to celebrate those issues, those obstacles, those hardships
01:16which just come naturally to you by virtue of gender and not because you are in a situation
01:23and to celebrate those fine nuances is why I made this film. Apart from that,
01:29there's a conscious decision for me to cover various age groups in the film because I feel
01:33the women that we've seen in our stories, in our films, they belong to a certain age group like 20
01:39to 28. Below that and beyond that, they cease to exist. Half the population is not everybody
01:47from 20 to 25 and pretty. We are very interesting and we have great things to say.
01:57I always wanted to make films. I was always a storyteller at heart because of my own insecurities,
02:04feeling of failure, then letting people down around me, starting when I have two kids,
02:11just there's a lot of pressure. When I took that risk and let go, I was like,
02:16it's okay. I'm going to start from the scratch. I'm going to keep knocking doors and I'm going
02:20to keep writing scripts. I'm going to keep making drafts after drafts to the time I do this and
02:24this is the biggest risk that I took. I left a job. I left many jobs to do this. I was
02:31into corporate jobs. I was a programmer. Then I came to Bombay. I was a lecturer at three colleges.
02:37I left that and this is the risk that I took because this is where my heart was.
02:50I'm an optimist. I'm not going to look at and very honestly, I take pride.
02:56Earlier on, I used to get really worked up. I had my own insecurities and when I let go of
03:02these insecurities and those complexes, I'm okay. I'm okay being Ayushman's wife. I'm okay being
03:08Virajveer and Varushka's mother because I cherish these roles. I cherish these people in my life
03:14but at the same time, I appreciate people who know me by my name, by my work, by my nature
03:21and just don't attribute my existence to my family around me.