Twinkle Khanna Says Akshay Kumar’s Advice to Her Writing Is Simply “Mat Kar”
MUMBAI, India — Author Twinkle Khanna said her husband, actor Akshay Kumar, has made only one consistent contribution to her writing career: telling her not to pursue certain topics.
Speaking on the kind of input she receives from Kumar, Khanna said, “This morning, I was discussing the topics I plan to touch upon in my next column, and he told me, ‘Mat karna…do not get into that issue’. Mat kar is basically his only and biggest contribution to my writing career.”
Khanna, who has written several books including Mrs Funnybones, Mrs Funnybones Returns, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad, Pyjamas Are Forgiving, and Welcome to Paradise, shared her perspective on writing as part of World Book Day reflections.
“My job is to make people reflect on the things that are visible. But our own conditioning blinds us to those factors. It might make people uncomfortable and they might call it offensive… (But) I think about how I will unravel the layers of conditioning not just around them but also around me because I also find my way through life as I write,” she said.
She said her focus has always been on what she contributes through her work, noting that both books and cinema have played major roles in shaping her experiences.
“It is what I was able to give that medium, and books have always been my life and actually so has cinema. So much of what I write has been because of the experiences that I also had as a young actor, whether it was seeing the basic inequalities between men and women, which I only realised much later in life,” Khanna said.
Khanna added that her skill set aligns more naturally with writing, driven by her love of language and poetry.
“It comes a little bit from perhaps, my father, because I have a distinct memory when I was very young and I said, ‘Will you pick me up from school?’ And he said, ‘Are you a pickup? I will fetch you from school.’ That kind of just set my parameters of what language can do. And I grew up in a family of readers. My sister reads more than I do,” she said.
Reflecting on her younger self, Khanna said she used to read more in her 20s than she does now. If she could offer advice to her 20-year-old self, she said, “Just keep doing what you’re doing and finish the book you started when you were 18. I’m 52, and that one book I haven’t been able to finish yet.”
“I’ve tried three times in my life. I’m just unable to write that particular book. Maybe it’s too close to home, so my emotions get in the way of transferring that onto the page,” she added.
Khanna also shared some of her favorite books, including A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, along with works by Kiran Desai, Haruki Murakami, Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jhumpa Lahiri, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and P.G. Wodehouse. (Source: IANS)
