“Bala is about the importance of self-love,” Bhumi Pednekar

While Ayushmann Khurrana battles the taboo of premature balding, Bhumi battles huge societal stereotype because she is dark-skinned in their next release Bala. Bhumi reveals that the film is trying to give out aloud an important social message that self-respect and self-love are extremely important in a judgemental, myopic visioned society. 

“I realised from my first film that the kind of cinema I really like being a part of has to be entertaining. It has to be fun, quirky, it really needs to take my audience through a journey full of emotions but at the same time it needs to leave them with a thought and this is the precise reason why I selected Bala. My character deals with the colour bias that exists in our country.” 

Bhumi reveals details about her character saying, “She is a dark-skinned but extremely beautiful girl. She is very confident, she is everything, she is perfect. But people around make her feel like she is just not complete because of the lack of awareness that our country has. Just the obsession with fair-skinned people - I mean if you look around you will see advertisements of fairness creams, if you look at matrimonial ads - there is a constant need of a fair girl, they need a girl who is thin, tall and obviously fair.” 

Bhumi wants to fight this petty mindset that society has for dark complexion. She says, “As a society, we have set such wring benchmarks, these incorrect moulds about the perfect definition of beauty. And I have personally taken it upon myself to break the definition of beauty because beauty is very subjective. It is very unique to each person. God has made each of us differently and we need to accept ourselves. And that is what Bala is about. The movie is about self-respect and self-love and when I read about the script there was something that instinctively connected with me.” 

Bhumi further adds, “My character Latika, she is an orphan and lives with her aunt. Her aunt is a very open-minded person but I think Latika is just a confident girl who always has her defences up. She is a lawyer. The reason she is like this is because, ever since she was a child, people teased her for her colour and she has been called names and humiliated her by saying really derogatory things. I think that is why she has taken it upon herself in the film to kind of set things straight in this really flawed society. The whole idea of ugly being associated with the word dark is something the film will try and demolish.”

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With inputs from the Public Relations Manager