What Women Want!

She is the badass girl who makes sure you don’t get away with calling a spade a club. She is RICHA CHADHA, the actress with the magic and the girl with the charm, writes SHUBARNA MUKERJI SHU.

- Shubarna Mukerji Shu

So many women oriented films, this is evidently the golden era of Indian films, how are you milking it?

It is not like we have not had films which had strong women characters earlier; women-oriented films as they are called. Remember Nutan’s BANDINI, Nargis in MOTHER INDIA, Smita Patil’s works. It was only during the late ’80s to ’90s that women became purely ornamental, and that trend continued for over a decade. The difference perhaps is now a lot more commercial actors are opting to doing these films, which is great. It is awesome that an Alia (Bhatt) is doing UDTA PUNJAB, Sonam (Kapoor) is doing NEERJA, there is Deepika (Padukone) with PIKU and so on… Of course, there are actors like Radhika Apte with films like PHOBIA, and Swara (Bhaskar) did a bold thing by doing a character much older than her age, in NIL BATTEY SANNATA. I did that in three films which is not easy at all, not so much in the acting but the risk that you take on as a career move. I really like how Kalki (Koechlin) handles herself. She writes, she is doing some awesome work. I loved the video she made.

There is a lot that is happening for women but it is still all about the men, isn’t it? …What they think, how they perceive you and such... How do you think men perceive you, and how much does that clash with the person you really are?

I don’t know what men think about me, and I don’t really care; you cannot live your life thinking about what others think and what you want them to think. It is frightening to live life like that…

With all the views all out there in the open on social media, there is really no evading these opinions. I don’t know how you do it.