A candid interview with actress-turned-author Sonali Bendre who was in town on Saturday evening to launch her book on parenting.
Sonali Bendre
Fresh from launching her debut novel, The Modern Gurukul, My Experiments with Parenting, we caught up with glamazon Sonali Bendre, who was recently in the city. A chronicling of her journey as a mother so far, it’s comforting to know that celebrities have their fair share of struggles, like the rest of us. “It was a cathartic experience. Even while writing it, I learnt many lessons, which I didn’t realise were in my subconscious mind,” she shares.
The book is meant to be a breezy read with colourful anecdotes of her new life as a mother, and includes incidents such as the time when she did pushups at a restaurant to get her son to be more physically active and her frustration over her him possibly disliking her breast milk.
Apart from motherhood, it seems that Bendre has also been mastering the whole marriage game with aplomb. We asked her what’s the secret. “The answer for that is too long and we don’t have enough time for that. I’ll have to write a new book in reply to your question,” shares Bendre, who opted out of the limelight after her marriage to filmmaker Goldie Behl in 2002.
Jokes aside, much has been said about how she was in two minds about publishing the book for fear of being judged for her choices as a parent. “Being a public figure, criticism is part and parcel of life. And that pertains mainly to your work. But the contents of my book are about my personal life and what I went through behind closed doors. And that’s what made it that much more harder to share with the world,” she says.
“It was Goldie, who read the first draft. I didn’t want to go through with it if he wasn’t comfortable with it, because he is a huge part of the book. Ranveer (her son), knows he’s in the book but has no idea what I’ve said. So in a few years’ time, when he’s all grown up, he’s going to come up to me and badger me for embarrassing him, which I’m preparing myself for,” laughs Bendre, who was most recently seen in the fiction show Ajeeb Daastaan Hai by Balaji Telefilms.
Despite her fears, the response for her book has been phenomenal, by her own admission. “A lot of wishes have been pouring in from all my peers, like Tina (Ambani), and it really means a lot. I sometimes wonder why I was scared in the first place about getting myself published. People who have known me and been around all my life come up to me and say they didn’t know I had it in me to write a book. That never fails to make me feel grateful,” reveals Bendre. But has it been easier because of her celeb status? “I think I found a publisher easily because I’m a well known name. But after that, it solely depends on how good the book is,” she explains.
Having donned the multiple roles of a model, an actress, and a TV personality and most recently, an author, Bendre revealed that it’s the family role, that trumps everything else. “While I enjoyed doing each of these things, I think it’s the roles of a daughter, wife and mother that are more important,” she says.
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( Source : deccan chronicle )
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