Dear Rani Mukherji,
First, thanks for trying to ruin all the conversations on women empowerment in 2018 India. Despite the several conversations around #MeToo, despite your old and young colleagues accusing your male colleagues of sexual harassment, despite the fact that it took them so long to speak up, you just proved that patriarchy is ingrained in men and women alike. You just explained why the Oxford Dictionary chose 'toxic' as the word of the year.
Like every year, Rajeev Masand called for a round-table conference of Bollywood’s biggest female stars: Deepika Padukone, Anushka Sharma, Alia Bhatt, Tabu, Rani Mukerji and Tapsee Pannu. Big names, and much celebrated. But we are doubting the 'celebrated' part now.
When the topic of sexual harassment within Bollywood came up, Rani had a perspective so twisted and illogical that we can bet she must have had chowmein before the show. The Hichhki star was pretty adamant that it is women who need to change. "If they don’t want it to happen it will not happen,” she screamed. Then, instead of pointing the finger at men, she said women should “take responsibility for themselves”. She became the champion of martial arts and said all schools must make it compulsory for girls to take defense classes. In her own words, the women who are getting harassed "those are the women we need to talk to and say yaar you need to change”.
The expressions of actors at that roundtable pretty much summarised all our emotions.
But Rani didn't stop. Even when Deepika and Alia tried to intervene and explain to her that women are often not in a position to do martial arts, she kept throwing her hands around (Apparently they were martial art moves) and made karate chop sounds.
If you are a woman, you must already be exhausted explaining colleagues, relatives, strangers on the road, Tinder dates, a man who came to your party uninvited and several other folks why it is not okay to victim blame women. I, for one, thought that at least the #MeToo conversation would instill some sense in people. Alas, I was hoping for too much. So it's exhausting to explain why Rani's logic is plain stupid. So, I decided to make a list for Rani and all the people who believe women are to be blamed for sexual harassment.