Arjun Kapoor recently shared a candid opinion about inspiring change and initiating conversation through theatre medium. At the FICCI Young Leaders Summit in Mumbai, the actor opened up about Ki & Ka and Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar and shared how his films ignited a change of thought among viewers, creating a thoughtful arc against age-old norms and ideologies.
Speaking about addressing typical gender roles, Arjun says, “I have done a film like Ki & Ka. I don’t know how to be the torchbearer of change easily just by talking about it. Equality, women's empowerment, gender bias - these are conversations that are very layered. This has stemmed from our patriarchy, society, culture - and it is not something that has happened in the past 15-20 years - there are 100s of years of thought processes that we need to remould and reshape. When one tries to break past it, there’s always a push coming from the other side. The idea is to keep going. As an artist, an actor and a human being, you slowly engage with the right people to understand whether they are paying attention and are understanding.”
Ki & Ka broke past the typical narrative of gender roles, and it left a significant impact on how the society sees males, females - and professions. “In a film like Ki & Ka, it’s a sincere and overloaded metaphor about how women need to be given equality. I think it would have seemed like we were influencing, trying to tell someone how to be. But we were simply trying to make a romantic comedy about a man who wants to become a house husband, and a woman who wants to aspire to live a life in the corporate world. When you simplify it as a romantic comedy, the husbands didn’t mind watching the movie with their wives, and the wives didn’t mind seeing a film that is a rom-com. In the garb of it, there was a thought that came out,” he says and sheds light on the change brought by Ki & Ka.
“Even today when I’m on flights, people come and tell me that they started helping their wives after watching Ki & Ka. So it doesn’t mean that you start understanding everything, but as a man, you start respecting what a woman is doing at home to run it,” he adds. In Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, Arjun played the role of ‘Pinky' - a character name that’s unexpected. But, he subtly throws light on why the name is seen the way it is seen. “When I did Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, I played a character called Pinky in the film. We often relate the color pink with femininity. The ideology has been set like that. One cannot control the views of a film. I do films like Mubarakan, Half Girlfriend, Tevar and more, but every now and then I try to find a film that has some kind of thought to it, some kind of layer to it,” he says.
He concluded on an empowering note, stating that one’s understanding of self helps them better to put their opinions forward. “In a world where there is so much noise, you have to retain those core values because you cannot shift every year because there are new thoughts emerging. I lost my mother at a young age, so my ideologies were formed at a young age. I’m not going to change unless something convinces me to change over a course of time. And I don’t want to change my belief system just because. I need to have an identity of my understanding - only then will it help me to put strong opinions.