Actor Kangana Ranaut is someone who doesn’t shy away from speaking her truth, without using sugar-coated words and with no intention to please anyone with her statements. After speaking against what she calls ‘Bollywood’s mafia’, a part of media who she thinks is biased and bringing to the fore issues like nepotism and favourtism in the industry, Kangana has now spoken on the issue of pay disparity in Bollywood. The same has been discussed many times by various prominent names from the industry. But, Kangana has a different point of view.In her latest interview with Times of India, the actor talked about how a female actor should be confident before quoting an amount in front of a filmmaker but just not think that every male actor gets more money because of his ‘gender.’ Kangana said gender discrimination happens in the industry when it comes to quoting fees to female actors but in some cases, a male actor is given more remuneration simply because of his experience and reach among the audience. She said, ” I think every time a hero charges what he charges isn’t because of his gender. They come with experience as well. Today, to simply say that because I am this gender I am not getting this is not true… because look, I am getting what I am getting. I don’t think so it is because of my gender. But to make juvenile statements like that and to create a complex in a girl child that maybe the world is going to be like this to me or that’s how the world has been to other women before me is so wrong.”She added that a woman in the industry will have to work hard for the day when the women of the coming generation can have a female-centric film without a male hero as its protagonist. Kangana said the whole idea behind speaking and putting more efforts each day is to make sure that women tomorrow don’t have to face the kind of struggles women today in the industry are facing. She took the example of Akshay Kumar’s Mission Mangal that was released recently and said, “My point is that as an artiste rather than making juvenile statements and harming the movement, why not work on girl literacy rate, women empowerment, women employment. Today when one makes a movie like Mission Mangal, you need a male star because that is the 80 per cent population of the cinema-going audience. But why these women collectively do not work on these causes? Maybe our generation will not benefit but look, what we did today… so many women are benefitting out of that. So, we need to go further and empower our women and then obviously the proportion will change.”Requesting women to show the world they are confident by not settling for less, Kangana said it’s important for a woman to understand that she deserves the best and no male counterpart can tell her how much she should be paid for her work. The Manikarnika-star was quoted saying, “I guess a lot of women are trivializing the pay parity issue. You cannot make yourself a lesser being that we women don’t get or don’t deserve and one hero is deserving of so much more. Don’t project yourself to a lesser being. That is causing so much more damage.” What do you think of Kangana’s point of view?
