How Twinkle Khanna's New- Found Fame Helped Her Hit Midlife Crisis Out Of The Orbit

Twinkle Khanna on the impact of words, battling gnat infestations, and how she almost became a stand-up comic.

- Monica Bathija

When she was young, Twinkle Khanna had plans to become a writer at 60. She even had her look sorted. Somewhere in the back of her head, she says, “I used to always have this vision that when I would be 60… I had the look ready, short white hair, short nails, and I’d wear a white kurta and I’d be going on my scooter in Goa and my kids will be grown up and all of that... So I knew that I would eventually do that. I just thought I’d be much smarter at 60, I’d have more to say.”

The scooter (a yellow Bajaj) is already parked in Goa, the world of words has been in place since she was a kid, so if life has changed her plans, it is only in that the timeline has been advanced. Khanna, 43, started writing a few years ago, when a friend approached her to pen a celebrity column for a newspaper. “She came to me and said, ‘Why don’t you write?’ And I replied, ‘But I haven’t written anything for ages.’”

As a teenager, she recollects, she wrote poetry and half a book at 18, and then not a word for 18 years—not even a diary entry. “But she’s like, ‘You read so much, I’m sure you can write.’ I said millions of people watch cricket, doesn’t mean they can play. She said, ‘Try’. And for some reason I said yes.”

We are sitting in her office in the building at the end of ‘Akshay Kumar wali galli’ (as the locals refer to it) in suburban Juhu in Mumbai, and Khanna is talking of how her becoming a writer came about. “In the beginning, if I had to struggle through what I go through now, I would have given up. But I had so much to say at that point, it was just like I was pretty much throwing up on paper and the columns became popular… and here I am.”