Taapsee Pannu Said A Slap Shows Disrespect, Not Love. Hey Sandeep Vanga, Are You Listening?
Love is different to different people but in any definition, it can’t be justified as a free pass to establish control over another person. Then it’s not love but a manifestation of your own ego and thirst for power. This kind of insanity was exhibited last year in unfortunately one of the highest earning movie of 2019, Kabir Singh. The fact that Indian men are big on misogyny could be the underlying reason behind this. And then its director, Sandeep Reddy Vanga made it worse by saying, “When you are deeply in love and deeply connected with a woman, and vice versa, there’s a lot of honesty in it. If you don’t have that physical demonstration… you don’t have the liberty of slapping each other, then I don’t see anything there.” It made our blood boil but thanks to Taapsee Pannu and her next, Thappad, our faith in what this country possibly considers love is restored.
Talking on such violence in relationships, Taapsee Pannu told IANS, “I think no one takes a stand against the disrespect of women, including women themselves. Standing up against it is the need of the hour. Women who are living in poor economic condition cannot stand up because of their conditioning and financial dependency on their spouses. They have no place to go and they do not earn money, so they deal with disrespect and torture every day. In elite society, they refuse to address the issue only because they look at it as social embarrassment and (feel that) it hampers their image of a perfect family!”
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In relationships, people end up feeling a sense of ownership of their partner and believe that they have the right to slap them to school them. Most of the time, they are convinced it’s for their own good or for the relationship. Some people even justify that one slap doesn’t constitute violence. They think it’s not domestic violence if nobody was kicked or brutally injured. But Taapsee would like to disagree. “The fact is, whether it is one slap or several more slaps or other acts of domestic violence, it all comes from a place of disrespect and discrimination. There is nothing called a slap out of love. No, never,” she said.
In fact, the need to school someone with violence is deeply ingrained in our society. “A kid is slapped by an elder because of the elder wants to create fear in the child’s mind, because the child is comparatively weak. It is the wrong style of parenting. Since childhood, the human mind learns to normalise a few acts of physical violence like slapping or raising a hand. In adulthood, men especially use the same habits to control people. It is a cycle and we need to question it,” Taapsee pointed out.
Thappad is a movie about a millennial married couple. Things take a turn for the worse when the husband slaps his wife in front of guests at home and she walks out of the marriage. This is so wonderful and something that needs to be talked about a lot more. A slap is trivialised in our country and shamefully so. People fail to see the bigger picture that it’s still violation of someone’s dignity because more than to cause pain, it’s used as a tool of humiliation. Which is why, I am so glad that someone is finally making a movie on this subject. Honestly, I would never ever take such toxicity in any relationship, no matter how dear it is to me. I don’t believe parents have the right to slap their kids either because like Taapsee said, we are just teaching them that it’s okay to slap someone when you love them or teach them a lesson for their own good.
Taapsee Pannu, who has worked in several women-oriented movies and played strong characters found it difficult to be in her character’s shoes in Thappad. “The character Amrita was suffocating for me in the end and I took it as a challenge. After 15 days of shooting, I started feeling claustrophobic. It was tough for me to get out of my firebrand image and mind-space and get into the skin of this character,” she said.
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She further added, “She took all the typical nonsense of ‘girls should compromise,’ ‘little physical violence is part of love,’ ‘and girl should do everything to save the marriage.’ As Taapsee, I cannot take such no-sense at all. So, emotionally I was feeling claustrophobic.”
Thappad is scheduled to release on 28th February, 2020.
