Rajeev Masand recalls conversation he had with Rani Mukerji after her controversial comments on roundtable: ‘Trolling is fine’

Appearing on the 2018 actresses roundtable along with Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt and others, Rani said that martial arts should be made compulsory in schools, so that women are able to physically defend themselves when they are required to. Recalling that incident, Masand said, “When Rani was on the roundtable, she got a lot of flak for talking about getting girls to learn self-defence. That got a lot of… And people said, ‘Didn’t you think of cutting it out?’ No, that’s her opinion, and she was a real sport about it. She said, ‘It’s okay, the trolling is fine, that’s how I feel’.

Rani had said in her original comments, “I think as a woman you have to be that powerful within yourself, you have to believe that you’re so powerful that if you ever come into a situation like that you have the courage to say ‘back off.’ I think you have to have the courage to be able to protect yourself.” Deepika had countered, “I don’t think everyone is constructed with that sort of DNA… But why to even bring it to the point where girls should learn self-defence.” An undeterred Rani then said that nobody can tell women how to parent their children.

Masand also remembered when an interaction about nepotism between newcomers Ananya Panday and Siddhant Chaturvedi ‘became a thing’. “I really, genuinely felt that was unfair, because you can’t attack people for their opinions,” he said, adding that he now works with her in a different capacity, and she once joked about the incident with him.