Back to School

Six months after the birth of her son Ranveer, actor Sonali Bendre Behl disliked the person she saw in the mirror — an overweight and poorly dressed woman with dark circles under her eyes. She felt like she was living in someone else’s body. Now looking nowhere close to the person she encountered a decade ago, the actor brought back memories from Sarfarosh (1999), Hum Saath Saath Hain (1999) and Major Saab (1998) at Babyoye Store in Gurgaon last week.

At the launch of her book The Modern Gurukul: My Experiment With Parenting (Random House India; Rs 250), Behl shared anecdotes from doing push ups in a restaurant to motivate her son to pick up physical activity, to raising a child in a digital age. “The gurukul in the vedic times had various ways of education, where a child was taught to be an integral part of the society. It was not just about doing mathemathics, astrology, languages or history, but it was about knowing music, physical activity, dharma and spiritual teachings. The teacher was everything in the system and this not what we find today with our education system,” she said, to her audience of young mothers. “I wondered how I could get those things that I liked in that system into our lives today? In the book, I have tried to bring certain old values and have adapted them to present times.”

Behl has had her share of good and bad days with the demanding job of parenting, experiences of which led to the germination of her book, which has hit stands this month. The actor , who chose to opt out of the spotlight after having a child in 2005, says, “The book has been within me since my son was been born. I realised this is not just about parenting and being a superwoman, but life in general and getting your answers from the most expected sources, be it a TED talk or reading an article somewhere.”