From acting, to dabbling in interiors, to making a splash in the literary world, to turning producer with her story based on the creator of low-cost sanitary napkins, Twinkle Khanna has evidently finally found her groove. Speaking about the transition, she maintains, “I don’t regret any part of this journey, even the brief stint as an actress where my meagre brain cells were probably rather busy trying to commit hara-kiri in despair, because experiences add to your abilities, even if it is just your ability to laugh at yourself. I am looking at interesting stories for my next project, but first I have to make sure that my superhero Padman takes to the skies.”
PadMan started off as a story she was writing, The Sanitary Man, and it pretty much took over her life. As she tells it, “We don’t have control over what our mind wants to do, or where it goes sometimes. I wrote ten chapters of a novel right after Mrs. Funnybones. But while I was researching for my column, I stumbled upon the story of Arunachalam Muruganantham. It gripped me and I abandoned my novel and began writing The Sanitary Man.” Realisation grew that Muruganantham’s journey was an important story and after a while she began feeling that the only way it would truly reach households in both urban and rural India and begin a conversation about something that so far has been wrapped in newspaper (sanitary pads), was by making a movie on the subject.
The film has been inspired by the life of Arunachalam Muruganantham, a small town entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu who invented low-cost sanitary napkins to generate awareness in rural areas.
Twinkle also shared that initially she thought of making a small film, but husband and lead actor Akshay Kumar, and director R. Balki’s enthusiasm about the concept took the project places. And in her ever-candid style she also admits that “on this movie, the things I normally nag him about, like working too much, turned out to be an asset!”
By the sound of that, we definitely see Twinkle Khanna donning the writer-producer’s hat a lot more in the near future.
