“I have no inhibitions for lip-lock scenes so long as the filmmaker doesn’t objectify women and justifies the act in the script”, Shalini Pandey of Arjun Reddy fame tells DC as she opens up exclusively about her conservative family, how her parents did not approve her choice of being an actress, her ‘marriage phobia’, her detached nature which never allows her to get into serous relationships, casting couch and the nightmarish experience working with a real chimpanzee in Gorilla etc.
What the doctor says seems like a valid point, considering how, according to scientists, adolescence too has been extended to the age of 24. Our generation seems to have a different set of priorities, which we are willing to take time to accomplish.
Life Coach Khyati Birla is of the opinion that it’s because of a change in mindsets brought on by changing times. “Men don’t want to be tied down to a number. They want to break and defy social norms. Nowadays, restrictions no longer apply on what you should be doing at a particular age. Mindsets are changing and so, age becomes just a number,” she says.
However, while one is, as Khyati says, ‘living in the moment’, one must not forget that actions have consequences. “I’m not an ageist, but I am against a sense of entitlement, where people think they can do anything at any age. We end up looking for instant gratification and don’t weigh the consequences as much as we used to earlier. There was a healthy fear in people before, which is absent now,” adds Khyati.
The way around this seems to be mindfulness. The life coach puts it beautifully, “We cannot predict the consequences of our actions, but all we can do is be mindful about the decisions we are making. So that five-10 years down the line, our decisions still stand.”
