Looking Back: When Padman Arunachalam Murugananthan mistook Twinkle Khanna for Raveena Tandon
Looking Back: When Padman Arunachalam Murugananthan mistook Twinkle Khanna for Raveena Tandon
Twinkle Khanna recalled that Padman Arunachalam Muruganantham mistook her for Raveena Tandon when she approached him for writing his story
Needless to stress that Twinkle Khanna is a prolific writer. Recently the actor-turned-writer’s book
‘The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad’ contained four stories, one of was named ‘The Sanitary Man of Sacred Land’. The author would have ended the story when Padman Arunachalam Muruganantham mistook her for actor Raveena Tandon, if it was not her ‘greed’ for narrating a good story.
Her book ‘The Sanitary Man of Sacred Land’, one of the four stories in the book, on Tamil Nadu-based Muruganantham, created affordable sanitary napkins for the women of his village.
According to Twinkle, the activist mistook her as Tandon while giving his nod to write the story. He looked at her and mistook her for Raveena Tandon.
At that point, she didn’t want to write his story but her greed was so much that she overcame that slight,” she quipped in the midst of a discussion on her recently released book, “Welcome To Paradise”, at Sunder Nursery on Sunday. She later produced the 2018 film ‘Pad Man’, a fictionalised account of Muruganantham’s life which starred her husband actor Akshay Kumar in the lead.
Fresh from completing a master’s programme in fiction writing from London’s Goldsmith College, Khanna said it is fiction that makes the “truth more palatable”.
The 50-year-old drove her point home with an interesting potato analogy.
The truth is like a potato. You make French fries, you make aloo jeera, you are presenting potatoes only. The potato’s chemical composition doesn’t change. “It is just the way it is everywhere, and that’s what we do with all our experiences, memories… The truth doesn’t change, we just change the way we are representing it,” she explained. A self-confessed fan of science fiction, the author advised budding writers to read genres as diverse as possible. “No one can teach anyone to write. That would be teaching you how your perspective is shaped and that doesn’t happen. But they (the experts) do teach you how you can analyse your work because you are analysing everyone else’s work, and that is the sort of scaffolding you can use..She reads at least three-four short stories every night. “Welcome To Paradise”, published by Juggernaut Books, is a collection of stories exploring the depth of loneliness, heartbreak and deception.
News Edit K.V.Raman
