Konkona Sensharma has established herself as a reliable actor and director over the years. On the acting front, Konkona was seen in Metro… In Dino this year, where she was paired opposite actor Pankaj Tripathi. In the film, she is also seen romancing a man younger than her, actor Rohan Gurbaxani.
On an episode of their chat show, Kajol and Twinkle Khanna had asked a question to Salman Khan and Aamir Khan about why when older male actors romance younger female actors, it’s called cinema magic, while when it happens the other way round, it’s called bold. The same recently happened as Ranveer Singh was paired opposite 20-year-old Sara Arjun in Dhurandhar. Having been in those shoes, Konkona Sensharma presents her take on the matter.
“It’s the audience’s prerogative and their right. Somebody can see it as bold, somebody else might not. For me, personally it’s not a bold concept because there’s so many different couples of different age groups in real life. We see it even amongst famous people, and it’s slowly kind of becoming normalised, so why do we need to keep on harping about all this? It is not interesting for me personally, but I have no objection to other people discussing it,” says Konkona, who was last seen in the web series Search: The Naina Murder Case.
The actor insists that while women are tried to be fitted in certain boxes, it’s unfair to do so. “There is no one way of being a woman. That is something even Durga exemplifies, showing all the different roles that women can inhabit and all different ways that one can be a woman. There is no one described way that it has to be. So it is nice to have that lens open up so that we can see the complexities and nuances of human beings,” she ends.
She adds, “In both my films, the age gap served a different purpose. Just to see it from the lens of romancing a younger man and it being bold, it’s a little boring for me. In Metro, it was very humorously done and that actually brought out Pankaj’s dilemma. No one talks about Pankaj going to a hotel to meet another young woman. I don’t know why that is not called ‘bold’? Even in Dolly Kitty, it was a comment on the difficult marriage that my character was going through. So she had this affair with this younger man, which was really on her path to self realisation of many things.”