Recounting a horrible incident can be traumatic for people. But when Sapna Bhavnani narrates the story of her gang rape in a spoken poetry performance, she hardly exudes any extreme swing of emotions and keeps her act steady. In the national capital to participate in the Road to Global Entrepreneurship Summit organised by The Shift Series in association with NITI Aayog and The Global Education and Leadership Foundation, the gender rights champion and entrepreneur explains, “Don’t fall for the ease of the performance. I feel I am good at articulating what happened to me without really showing you what I really went through. What you saw on stage is necessarily not the whole story. But yes, it has become easier for me to perform this piece especially in last one year ever since I started writing my memoir. I have been dealing with my own stories in a way. I just came back from Chicago where I went to the spot where the actual act (gang rape) happened and I think it gave me the strength to stand here and talk about it.” Her memoir, which will be published next year, is tentatively titled Chapter One.
A video she shared recently of M.S. Dhoni grooving to Jhak Maar Ke song from the movie Desi Boyz has gone viral. About the idea of sharing that video of the Captain Cool she says, “I have known and seen him from being a boy to grow up to be this man that he is today. What happens in the cricket field stays in the cricket field. Neither I follow the game nor I have seen Mahi as a captain or player. I don’t care what people say regarding his retirement. I have spent some amazing moments with him and sometimes, I share some of them from that bhandaar for his fans so that they get to known another facet of his persona.”
A grab from the viral video.
She goes on, “You can’t make him do anything. He will do it if he wants to do it. As much as I’d want to take credit for making him dance, no I didn’t.” So, does he like to dance? “He is a great dancer and a wonderful singer. I have some videos of him singing too. I think he is a little boy who somehow got mixed up in this whole big world of cricket,” guffaws the 46-year-old. Dhoni when he burst onto the scene, he made news not only for his unusual power hitting but also his hairdo. On this the celebrity hairstylist, says, “He is probably the only celebrity in India, who cut through because of his hair style.”
She posts a lot of nude pics on her Instagram profile. When so many actresses get trolled for posing in bikinis, one wonders if she also receives a lot of hatred online and she surprisingly denies. “I am not an actress. You can’t do item numbers on screen and then say don’t judge me. You can always say no to items numbers but you still do it. You took money to do it, so own up. In my case, I take responsibility of my actions. I use nudity a lot especially because in your country, we are ashamed of it and it leads to lot of repression. Any way, I am so inked right now, I can walk naked and you would think I am wearing clothes. We need schools to take sex education seriously,” she says and adds, “Women also are bad in many ways. We see a rickshaw wala ogling at us and we abuse him, but if a cute rich boy does that, it becomes okay. Dancing intimately with strangers in a club is okay but we abuse someone if he touches us inappropriately in public even by mistake. How is the mind process different in the two cases? We need to stop being elitist and racist.”
Here she narrates an anecdote. “Recently a rickshaw wala was staring at me and I asked him if he had not seen a woman before. He replied, ‘par aapke jaisi nahi dekhi.’ And I realised, where he comes from, he has genuinely not seen a woman with red hair and body full of tattoos. I remember the first time Mahi saw me, he too didn’t talk at all. On second meeting when he heard me playing Kishore Kumar, he spoke and said, ‘I am sorry but I had not seen a woman like you before and thus, kept quiet the first time’. We are too judgmental and it’s bad. For a video for A.R.Rahman, I stood before an rickshaw stand with free hugs board. 250 rickshaw drivers came to hug me and not one guy touched me the wrong way.”
If asked she is following Bigg Boss, the former inmate signs off on a lighter note, “I have not even seen my own episodes.”
