Twinkle Khanna - You know her as Mrs Funnybones, you know her as a thinking author; self-aware, sharp and the one who glides between insight and humour just as smooth as butter! Having authored Mrs Funnybones, Mrs Funnybones Returns, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad, Pyjamas Are Forgiving and Welcome to Paradise, Twinkle Khanna, on World Book Day, offers a window into her lens through which she views the world.
Known for putting her views candidly, she reveals if her next book would slightly offend everyone a little, would she consider it a success? Khanna has a feeling that it will "offend quite a few people" but her job is not to go around offending people. "My job is to make people reflect on the things that are visible. But our own conditioning blinds us to those factors. It might make people uncomfortable and they might call it offensive... (But) I think about how I will unravel the layers of conditioning not just around them but also around me because I also find my way through life as I write."
Khanna has transitioned from being an actress to an author. For her, what stands out is what she has contributed to the spaces. "It is what I was able to give that medium, and books have always been my life and actually so has cinema," she says and adds, "So much of what I write has been because of the experiences that I also had as a young actor, whether it was seeing the basic inequalities between men and women. which I only realised much later in life."
Mrs Funnybones feels that her skill set aligns more with the world of books because she loves poetry and language. "It comes a little bit from perhaps, my father (late veteran actor Rajesh Khanna), because I have a distinct memory when I was very young and I said, 'Will you pick me up from school? And he said, "Are you a pickup? I will fetch you from school. That kind of just set my parameters of what language can do. And I grew u grew up in a family of readers. My sister (Rinkle Khanna) reads more than I do," she says and mentions that science fiction has shaped her entire perception about life.
Talking about whether she receives any suggestions from Akshay Kumar, Twinkle recalls, "This morning, I was discussing the topics I plan to touch upon in my next column, and he told me, 'Mat karna...do not get into that issue'. Mat kar is basically his only and biggest contribution to my writing career," she says with a pun.
Khanna reveals that her 20-year-old self was reading much more than what she reads now. If she could meet the 20-year-old Twinkle Khanna now, she'd say, "Just keep doing what you're doing and finish the book you started when you were 18. I'm 52, and that one book I haven't been able to finish yet," she says and continues, "I've tried three times in my life. I'm just unable to write that particular book. Maybe it's too close to home, so my emotions get in the way of transferring that onto the page.
Revealing the list of books she'd recommend to the readers, Twinkle says, "I would say Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove is a book that I love. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things is something that I have read several times and I continue to read it. Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: Haruki Murakami's Men Without Women; Octavia E Butler writes fantastic feminist science fiction: anything by Ursula Le Guin; short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri.... F Scott Fitzgerald, PG Wodehouse... My god! I mean, I am standing in front of my bookshelf, so tell me when to stop!"