Indian actress, Dia Mirza appeared in an interview with a publication and looked back at her days of struggle in Bollywood.
The 39-year-old shared about her initial days in film industry, she said, “I had no mentor and no one who could guide me, who could help me understand how to go about consolidating my choices or even making the right choices. I completely and solely depended on instinct and my managers at the time."
She continued, “So at the age of 19-20, I had to understand how to deal with this crazy public attention, adulation and rejection."
Mirza recalled, "When film reviews were written, they used to be very personal and the attacks also used to be very, very personal. They would actually border on vicious and those would be very hard to deal with. This is before the advent of social media. I genuinely mean it when I say that the vitriol that was spewed by certain journalists and film journalists in print and in the media about actors was so dangerous. It continues, but it was really rampant when I had started out."
The Thappad actor added, “Between the ages of 19-25, every film I did, it was said that I had an affair with my co-actor, my director or my producer.”
While talking about sexism in industry, Mirza said, “People were writing, thinking and making sexist cinema and I was a part of these stories... Rehnaa Hai Terre Dil Mein has sexism in it... I was acting with these people. I was working with these people. It's crazy. I will give you small examples. A makeup artist could only be a man, could not be a woman. A hairdresser only had to be a woman. When I started working in films there were at best about four or five women on any given crew with a unit strength of over 120, sometimes 180 people."
She further added, "We live in a patriarchal society and it is an industry largely led by men. So there is rampant sexism. And I think for a large part it is not even conscious sexism because there are so many men who are writers, who are directors, who are actors, who are not even aware of their sexist thinking.”
Mirza also shed light on how women are viewed in Bollywood, she stated, “Look at the way song lyrics or scripts are written about women... that needs to change. The way women are portrayed and talked about in the industry is not okay, and as women, we should not agree to work in those films because we are just harming ourselves. There is no price too high, especially considering all that has happened over this year... Each one of us needs to make better choices, or we will be subjected to a witch-hunt and we will be burnt at the stake!”
